#that they are in fact listening to players and trying to incorporate feedback

[keysmashingfantasies]

Hi! I absolutely love your fics and since AiB S2 had just ended, I was hoping you would take a Chishiya fic request. I'm a sucker for the enemies to lovers trope and was thinking it could be incorporated in the Jack of Hearts game (basically reader and Chishiya have no choice but to trust each other despite their differences). Amidst their tension, since they need to trust each other, both Chishiya and reader get to understand the other over time. Maybe a bit of angsty fluff?

Merry Christmas (if you celebrate) and Happy Holidays! I hope you get to enjoy this season of festivities!

hi! merry (belated) christmas and happy new year! i hope you got to enjoy the holidays too! here's your request! ❤️ feedback is always welcome and encouraged! i didn't do a explicit lovers situation, i left it open (bc lowkey im thinking of a pt 2) but i hope you can enjoy it nonetheless!

First, you were transported to that godforsaken world.

Then, you were made to play to get days to live.

And after that, you landed on a game of hearts where a rat tried to sell you out to save himself.

And a few days later, a bunch of zeppelins with face cards started to fly around and to avoid being shot until you turned to puree, you had to go on a game inside a prison complex to participate in yet another hearts game with the same rat that tried to use you to survive.

Just great.

You thought you'd just avoid him at first. He must be so used to fucking people over he doesn't even remember me, it's what you thought at first, but then his eyes met yours and they shone with amusement. He remembered you and didn't even look remotely embarrassed or guilty, in fact, he looked quite smug. It made your blood boil.

You decided to make your way over after you saw Chishiya leaning to murmur something in another player's ear. After sizing the boy in the overalls that looked absolutely terrified, you came to the conclusion that there was no better way to end Chishiya than to prevent him to be able to manipulate people.

You placed yourself on the other side of the boy, leaning on the wall opposite to Chishiya. "Hey", you spoke lowly. "Don't listen to him. He lies", you said. Chishiya raised his eyebrows, surprised. You remembered him after all.

"Huh?", the boy looked frantically back and forth as you and Chishiya as you stared each other down. You, boiling in fury and him smug as always.

"Ah, don't be too quick to take her word for it. It's your word against mine, after all. The game barely even started and here you are, already trying to get ahead. By what we know, you may be the Jack after all", he said, and the boy took an wobbly step to stand next to him.

"As if I'm the Jack. For all purposes, it could be you too. Aren't you used to leading people astray to their deaths?", you said, and Chishiya's face fell a bit, making you feel triumphant. He tried to sold you and accused you of being the Jack? The audacity.

He was about to open his mouth when another thing caught both of yours attention. A girl, dressed cutely, seemingly collecting players.

She came to your direction, standing in front of the three of you. "Do you want to play with us?", she said. Her fake smile grinded your gears even more, but you did your best to reciprocate. "But of course!"

"I'll play with you too", said Chishiya.

"Can't get rid of you, can I?", you grit out as you followed the group downstairs.

"We shall see", he said in a flat tone.

-

The game was nearing the end.

Your only ally, a woman in a red cardigan was led astray by the girl with the fake smile and cutesy dress, that in turn was betrayed by her own group. And now the group was getting smaller and smaller. There was Banda and a skittish boy with a fringe, and a couple. And you and Chishiya.

You eyed them all suspiciously. The game wasn't over, which meant the Jack was still among you. While you were looking around, trying to pretend you weren't straining your ears to listen to their conversation, Chishiya approached you.

"Do you know what they were doing before the game started?", he said, amused. You shook your head, not wanting to give him the time of day, but still listening with attention.

"Having sex. Inside one of the cells. He has full control over her", he said nonchalantly. "They'll do anything for each other. And the one right there, Banda. A serial killer, I saw on the news. Must've been a relief for him, being sent here...", he talked to you like someone talked about the weather, like you weren't in a death trap of a game.

"What do you want? For me to believe you? As if that's possible", you stood up, talking to him as quietly as possible. After all, it was best if the others thought you had an ally still. Even though you'd rather eat glass than to trust him with your life. "What? Want me to be like her?", you subtly nodded in the direction of the woman, that was absolutely entranced and attentive to everything the man was saying as if it was gospel. But it was probably a bunch of bullshit. "To follow you around until I'm useful to be bait?", earlier you were fuming but now you were just tired. Tired of dealing with all of this, and tired of seeing his face. Before, you wanted to beat him to a pulp for doing what he did. Now, you just wanted a peaceful and hidden place with food and maybe some rain for you to shower with.

"You're still mad at me for that?", he said. The game consisted of basically convincing people not to kill you. Since it was your first game and you got there desperate, and Chishiya was the first person you saw, you had delayed to him your entire story. That you worked with children, that you loved what you did. That you couldn't wait to see them again. And then he took it and used it as his own. If it was only between the two of you, you'd have died that day.

"Of course I am! I could've died", you said.

"And on any other game after that. It's not even about me anymore, is it?", he said as you stormed off to get water.

-

"It's not even about me anymore, is it?"

The fact was that no, it wasn't. He played by the rules, and did what he was supposed to do at a hearts game. And if what he was supposed to do was be a huge traitor, well, that's on the game masters' account as well.

You were there grabbing a bottle of water behind one of the shelves when Chishiya tried to approach the woman. She, of course, bewitched by her affair, didn't even respond. Chishiya was good at seeming calm, but you could see that if he was outwardly asking for help then he sure was desperate.

He was right. It wasn't about him at all.

You had to kill people too. Had to trick people too. And for what? You had no one but your students. Would you be able to look them in the eye knowing you killed innocent people to get back? Chishiya tricked the person you were before you got into the games. You for sure weren't that person anymore.

You made your way around the shelf to approach him, him turning around with a smile on his lips but you could see that his friendly facade faltered when he looked at you. He didn't expect anything from you and that strangely hurt. For a moment, as you and Chishiya contemplated each other, it was like looking at a mirror. Alone, untrustworthy. You took a deep breath.

"You were right, Chishiya", his eyebrows rose yet again. You remembered his name. "It wasn't about you", you slowly approached him.

"Turn around", you said, softly. For the first time since you were a desperate mess in a hearts game, you weren't glaring daggers at him. You seemed tired, and oddly at peace. He appreciated the change.

"Thinking about lying to me?", he said, feigning amusement.

"Thought", you corrected him. "But not anymore. Turn", you said again and he eyed you for a second before turning around in his heels. He could feel you stare at him, and he jumped slightly when he felt your fingers on the back of his neck, brushing his hair aside to look at his symbol.

"Diamonds", you breathed and he turned around.

You sat down on the table directly next to you, drinking your water.

"What, you don't want me to do it to you?", he said, plopping himself next to you.

"Are you thinking about lying to me?", you gave him a weak chuckle and he reciprocated with a small smile of his own.

"Thought. But not anymore. Turn", he said, the smile still there. You turned your torso away from him and he leaned over to look at it. You could feel his breathing on your neck and it gave you goosebumps.

"Hearts", he said. You laughed.

"I can't believe it", you said, looking at him. "Ironic, huh?", you raised your eyebrow. You felt contempt but that underlying bitterness showed through. Not at Chishiya anymore but at all of this, at yourself and he could definitely notice this shift.

"I work with children. I love what I do", he said after a beat of silence. You looked at him, perplexed. He really did all of this to toy with you? That's what you get for trying to help.

"You're an asshole", you say through clenched teeth, going to stand up when you felt his hand around your wrist. He wasn't squeezing you, you could shake him off by any means. But the overwhelming warmth of his palms and his gaze where all consuming, keeping you where you stood. He stood up, once again in front of you. "I'm not a teacher", he said.

You scoffed. "Of course you're not-", you started but he cut you off once more.

"I'm a pediatric heart surgeon. I was in the middle of my residency when I got here", he said. "What I said... Wasn't necessarily true. I don't love those kids like they're my own, because they're not. And I can wait to see them again. In fact, when I tell one to go home I hope I don't ever see them again. I hate dealing with people and the never ending questions and the sobbing parents. But it wasn't a lie either", he said.

"I... I didn't know...", you felt your face grow hot. He was a surgeon for kids. You never once wondered what he did before all this, but you assumed it was something shameful, since he decided to basically copy and paste your life story. You never once stopped to consider that maybe he did just have a similar life to you, after all. You felt sick all of a sudden.

"Don't apologize, there was no way of you knowing", he said. "I did what I did because you had something I didn't. You... Had that fire, that... Love. You wanted to see them again so bad. I didn't have that. I had to pretend", he said. He seemed... soft. Genuine. Your heart ached.

"I don't have that anymore", you said softly, avoiding his gaze. Chishiya felt needle pricks all over his body.

"I think you do", you looked up. "You wouldn't have come so far to give up", he said.

"I...", he started, but looked up at the sound of your voice.

"You...", you both talked at the same time. But that would have to wait because soon enough it was time to go inside the cells once more.

-

The game was over. While two of the remaining four tried to extract information from the Jack, you grabbed as much as you could carry and was making your way to the exit.

"What now?", you heard behind you.

"I don't know, Chishiya. What now?", you said.

"I'm looking for... my friends", you were surprised. He always struck you as a loner type. You did get him all wrong. "You could come. We can help each other leave this place", he said. "You're smart enough. A good player".

"Are you saying we're friends?", you asked, one eyebrow raised. Chishiya froze. He didn't think it'd escalate this quickly. Friends? You were similar. But he looked at you in a different way than he did other people. As his eyes darted around, you made your way towards him. "Something different?", you whispered like you were telling him a secret. You didn't want to say "more". Not yet, at least.

"Different, yes", he said, extremely relieved at your choice of words.

"One condition", you said and he nodded.

"You tell me about you. About your job. I'd love to visit when this all ends", he gave you a wobbly relieved smile.

"And you too. Tell me about your students", he said, walking alongside you as you exited the prison complex.

[tetrakys]

As a close friend of Chinomiko, how does your conversations go when it’s about mcl new gen, I’m pretty curious 🤭🤭 Because she probably can’t you stuff, so when you talk about your theories about each episode, she just sits and listens? heheh I wouldn’t be able to be her friend, I would probably beg her to spoil me!!

Ahah funny you say that because it's kinda the opposite, she knows I don't want to be spoiled in any way when it comes to plot or illustrations so no I don't discuss theories with her at all, that's what the fandom is for. We have often worked side by side on our own things and I'm not even tempted to snoop, I want to enjoy the games.

Of course it would be disingenuous to say that we don't talk about the games at all. We chat a lot about the characters, their personalities, not only New Gen but all her characters and OCs (her elf thief Thael? You'll see, he's going to be my Lance 2.0 😭💕😭💕). We also read the same books and talk about romance in general, tropes, things that people like and don't like. I do bring a player perspective when we chat about possible themes, and of course not everyone has my tastes and I absolutely don't act as if I'm representing the whole fandom, but I've been playing for so long that I can give suggestions on things I know the majority of players would hate or like.

For example, people were super scared that one of the LIs could possibly cheat at some point in the game, and I know for sure this is never going to happen because we've talked about this kind of things a lot. She miiiight create drama and make the MC and players think this is happening, just because she likes to torture her characters (and us all), but it won't actually happen. So, I guess in a sense I do have a different perspective on things, just because I know her and her tastes and opinions.

About New Gen, I honestly know nothing about what's going to happen, other than the fact that we will have more personal interactions with Jason starting the next episode, and that the story in general is kinda light hearted, there isn't going to be any real drama or deep plot. We should see it more as a sitcom than a drama, if we compared it to a tv show. And that's pretty much it 🤔 I'm trying hard to think if there's anything else I know that you guys may not know by this point but I can't think of anything. I do know she's many episodes ahead, but this isn't a secret, it was said many times even when working on other games, that the Bees are always at least one year ahead of us, so everything we see was planned a while ago, they can't really incorporate current feedback.

Would you really ask to be spoiled anon? I know it's tempting but I want to be surprised while playing the game 😌 I need to slowly fall in love 💕

[corvigae]

WANTS AND FEARS COMING TO THE SIMS 4

WANTS AND FEARS COMING TO THE SIMS 4

WANTS AND FEARS COMING TO THE SIMS 4

[aion-rsa]

Inside the Mortal Kombat Movie’s Bloody Love Letter to Martial Arts

https://ift.tt/3sPd50L

About 10 hours into a November 2019 flight to Australia and the set of Warner Bros. Mortal Kombat reboot, I started to ask myself whether this was all worth it. I loved the original Mortal Kombat movie about as much as anyone unironically can, but the fact remains that the history of live-action video game film adaptations is paved with disappointment. Even the best movies in that field have earned their reputation largely by exceeding low expectations.

After nearly 30 years of failed attempts, it’s hard to even picture what a good live-action video game movie might look like. What is it about the transition from sprites to screen that makes this process so difficult? Is this a pursuit that is, in some ways, doomed to be dictated by those who see such films as another piece of merchandise? What will it take to finally break the curse? Those questions raced through my jetlagged brain as I finally made it to Adelaide and prepared to see what awaited me on the other side of the world. 

Shortly into my visit, I was taken off my feet by a line that hit me like an MK player mercilessly spamming a leg sweep. It came in the form of this line from producer Todd Garner that reshaped my expectations and set the tone for what proved to be something that was very much worth the trip and perhaps worthy of your own wait:

“I think it’s great that there are a lot of characters, a lot of lore, and let’s do it all well. But really, people want to fuck each other up.”

Gore and Lore

Garner was, of course, mostly joking. Yet, there is a truth in many jokes, and the truth in this one seemed to be that managing what the Mortal Kombat canon has become can be a daunting task. It’s certainly not made any easier by the fact that there haven’t been many undisputedly great video game movies for the team to work with and use as precedent. 

In lieu of notable live-action video game adaptations that made good on their ambition, the film’s production team turned to a source that most would agree has. 

“It’s like the Marvel Universe…it’s endless,” says Garner of the Mortal Kombat game franchise. “So we started from the premise ‘What would Marvel do?’”

It’s a useful question that the upcoming Mortal Kombat movie answers in fascinating ways. For instance, as Garner noted, the MCU didn’t start with The Avengers; it started with Iron Man. That film allowed Marvel Studios to ease viewers into a project that was, in its own ways, also somewhat unprecedented. Similarly, the Mortal Kombat movie uses the character of Cole Young as a kind of audience surrogate. He’s a new face in this universe who is also trying to figure all of this out. 

It’s all part of a delicate balancing act that requires the cast and crew to constantly ask themselves how this movie looks to a diehard fan and how it will look to someone who is just coming into this. 

“There are five million people that play this game religiously, but there are 100s of millions of people in the world,” Garner says. “We didn’t want the other 95 million people to go, ‘What the fuck is this. What is this tone, what the fuck is happening?’”

It’s easy to understand how fans could quickly become overwhelmed. If you haven’t played the more recent Mortal Kombat games, you may be surprised to learn that they’ve adopted a complex serial storytelling narrative that combines years of mythology as well as the events of the most recent games. If you tried jumping into Mortal Kombat 11’s interdimensional, time-jumping story, without at least an explainer of what came before, you’d probably think it was madness. Amusing madness, perhaps, but madness nonetheless. 

As it turns out, even Mortal Kombat director Simon McQuoid had a lot of catching up to do. 

“I feel like I went to Mortal Kombat university,” says McQuoid regarding the experience of learning the intricacies of the franchise. “I also surrounded myself with a lot of people who know a lot more about this than me.”

In the same way that 1995’s Mortal Kombat benefited from director Paul W.S. Anderson seeking and utilizing fan and crew feedback, McQuoid’s own desire to surround himself with lifelong MK fans is just one of the ways that the crew is determined to ensure they don’t make the mistake others have before them by straying too far from the desires of those who helped make the Mortal Kombat franchise worthy of adaptation in the first place. His efforts ultimately come down to honoring an important word. 

“The word I use a lot is ‘respect,’” says McQuoid. “Respect for the fans, respect for the characters, and respect for the canon. The execution ultimately takes that into consideration from the absolute bedrock of listening to and understanding the fans.”

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Of course, as Garner previously eloquently noted, what many Mortal Kombat fans are looking for is over-the-top violence executed with flair. That is a big part of what made the original Mortal Kombat stand out in a crowded arcade scene, and it is certainly one of the qualities that have stayed with the series as it has evolved into this surprising vehicle for complex narratives and diverse characters. 

Fatality!

Of course, you can’t talk about Mortal Kombat violence without coming around to fatalities. What began as now strangely humble decapitations and spine extractions has evolved into a bloody ballet of highly choreographed violent ends that account for the lore and ability of every character. It’s something that was largely missing from the 1995 adaptation, and it’s something that Garner admits can be tricky to get right. 

“There’s crazy shit you can do in the game,” Garner says. “The problem with the fatalities, in general, is…I’m under the restrictions of the Motion Picture Association of America so I have to live inside those rules.”

In case you haven’t seen the recently released trailer, let me assure you now that the MPAA has not scared the team away from incorporating fatalities and MK’s other, bloodiest elements. In fact, McQuoid is practically at sea with the amount of blood on set. 

“I don’t know the gallon number, but I’ve seen drums of blood sitting around,” McQuoid informs his audience of gorehounds with a smile. 

So yes, there will be blood and lots of it in the Mortal Kombat reboot, but the team isn’t relying on the presence of blood alone to fulfill their equally important mission of telling a Mortal Kombat story as compelling as the ones featured in the games. Actually, they recognize that there are times when extreme amounts of violence can work against the dark tones that help make the franchise’s universe so compelling. 

“When I wanted a serious moment I didn’t want it to get comedic because we’re swashing blood,” McQuoid says. “It’s a tonal thing…you really need to feel it all instead of having people say ‘Oh, that’s funny.’” 

Besides, there are other ways to convey the series’ violent nature and brutal style that doesn’t necessarily require a drum of blood. From the first game in the franchise, Mortal Kombat has nodded to at least the cinematic history of martial arts. Whereas that series initially struggled to convey the fluidity and complexity of the best martial arts fights, though, the MK movie team has set a high bar for themselves. 

“The first thing I said to [stunt coordinator Kyle Gardiner] was “Okay, Kyle, you have to make the best fights that have ever been on film,” reveals McQuoid.

To anyone with a passing familiarity with the best fight scenes in film history, that idea has to come across as an absurd bit of hype. However, it starts to make a lot more sense when you look at the cast they’ve assembled. 

Choose Your Fighter

For a generation of fans raised on ‘80s action films and many major Hollywood genre productions that came after, it’s become somewhat easy to buy into the idea that untrained or largely untrained actors, bodybuilders, and models are the biggest badasses on the big screen. There’s a degree to which that’s what actors are supposed to do, but anyone who grew up on Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee or later found films such as The Raid and Ong-Bak can tell you that there’s nothing quite like watching uniquely talented martial artists push the boundaries of fight scenes by translating their real-world talents into cinematic splendor. In fact, the original Mortal Kombat arcade game was partially inspired by a desire to make a game that felt worthy of a John Claude Van Damme action film.

When it comes to getting Mortal Kombat right, then, there’s little doubt that the only way to go was to cast an all-star collection of martial artists and trained fighters rather than teach a cast of movie stars to look like they can do the things these guys can. However, I can’t emphasize enough just how crazy it was to watch even just snippets of what this essential superteam of martial artists push themselves to do when you put them in a room. Even those who have spent a considerable amount of time around the cast still express awe at what they’ve seen. 

“I’ve never made a movie like this before with this much fighting in it,” says Garner. “I don’t know what’s going on half the time, but they really are the best in the business…It’s so fast and even the camera is like, ‘Guys, can you slow down a little bit?’”

In some ways, the heart of this assembly feels like Sub-Zero actor Joe Taslim. As a renowned martial artist who many of us first saw in The Raid: Redemption, many action fans know that Taslim is the real deal. What you may not know is that Taslim is something of a Mortal Kombat superfan. His name was even tossed around a few times on the shortlist of best MK players on-set, as well as by some who suggested that Taslim helped set the pace (and raise the bar) for the speed of the action sequences. 

Then you have Tadanobu Asano as Raiden. As a legend of the Japanese film scene who has garnered more international acclaim in recent years by virtue of his work in 47 Ronin, Battleship, and the Thor films, Asano feels uniquely capable of playing the thunder god whose abilities sometimes set the standard in a universe of powerful fighters. He embodies the character so clearly that he’s already got his eye on the out of universe competition 

“Yeah, I can fight [Chris Hemsworth],” suggested Asano with a smile at the prospect of a Thor vs. Raiden film.

There also Max Huang who portrays Kung Lao: a beloved fan character who was sadly missing from the previous live-action adaptations. For him, the chance to finally bring that character to life echoes his own desire to further his transition from a celebrated stunt coordinator to a bonafide action hero.

“People like Bruce Lee were my heroes,” says Huang. “The ultimate goal was to become an actor, but there were few chances. A lot of times, it would just be a one-liner and that was it. These last few years I figured ‘you only have one life,’ so I just went for it.”

Few people are more qualified to speak on that subject than Liu Kang actor, Ludi Lin. As an advocate for representation in Hollywood, Lin has previously said how a lack of representation or even the wrong kind of representation can lead to feelings of shame and even isolation. For Lin, working with this many talented martial artists on a major Western production isn’t just a chance to showcase his own abilities; it’s a chance to help millions feel like they’re being seen. 

“Look, 60% of the world is Asian. A quarter of the world is Chinese,” says Lin. “I just don’t understand why there can only be one [in Hollywood films].”

Increased representation is always important, but at a time when violence against Asian Americans is on the rise, it stands to reason that the portrayal and prominence of Asian actors on film may be on more minds than ever before. So far as that goes, Mortal Kombat is uniquely positioned to not only showcase Asian heroes but pay respect to the clear Asian influences on the Mortal Kombat series in a way that the MK titles (especially the older installments) didn’t necessarily do before.

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“From my experience working with Simon [McQuoid], I’ve never worked with someone that’s so serious about being that authentic for another culture,” says Lin. “Just walking on set…on this film, there are so many different types of people of different ethnicities, different origins, and different backgrounds. It really represents the world.”

I could go on. Legendary Japanese action star Hiroyuki Sanada as Scorpion, the beloved Chin Han as Shang Tsung, rising star Mehcad Brooks as Jax…even non-action stars or martial artists like Kano actor Josh Lawson have found how they fit into this legendary assembly of cast and characters. 

“I was just saying to Asano-san, ‘Kano, he’s only funny because he’s balancing you guys,’” notes Lawson. “On his own, it’s nothing. But as a see-saw, the more seriously these guys take the mysticism and the power, the less seriously I can take it. That’s where the comedy exists. He can walk in and tell them, ‘Fucking hell.’”

Who is Lewis Tan?

With so much of the fun for fans coming from watching their favorite MK fighters come to life and battle on the big screen, it’s hardly a surprise that it’s one of the new characters, Lewis Tan as Cole Young, who has attracted so much early attention. How will he fit into a roster of such established characters? It’s a question that Tan is relieved to finally be able to answer.

“It’s just nice to even be able to talk about the character because there was so much speculation and hype up until this point about which character I’m playing,” Tan says with noted relief. “I wear Ray Bans a lot so people were like, ‘Oh, he’s Johnny Cage. [laughs]’”

He may not be Johnny Cage, even if Tan’s effortless charm and movie star looks make him a prime candidate for the role, but it’s incredible how easily the Cole character seems to fit into this universe of iconic characters. Along those same lines, Tan seems to have quickly established himself among a roster of top-tier martial arts and action actors. In some ways, his vocal enthusiasm for the project best captures the set’s general vibe.

“I don’t want to jinx it either but I can truthfully tell you, I felt magic when I got here and it’s been crazy ever since then,” says Tan of his experience until that point. “It’s crazy because I’m really hard on myself and I’m really hard on the work that I do. Sometimes I’m like, ‘Oh, this wasn’t it.’ And then I’ll see a little of a rough cut of what Simon was doing and then I’m like, ‘Oh. It’s amazing.’ There’s some stuff that I wasn’t on set for and then I saw that stuff and I’m like, ‘That’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.’”

Of course, it’s hard to talk about bringing Mortal Kombat to life without the people who quite literally help do just that. 

Exploding Heads and Blown Minds

At one point during my set visit, I found myself standing on a stunning recreation of the bridge that crosses the chasm on the iconic Mortal Kombat stage known as The Pit. It was a massive construction impressively built to serve as both a showcase piece and an actual set practically designed as the stage for one of the film’s fight scenes. 

The team informed us that the general philosophy was to ensure that (almost) anything that could be done practically was done practically. A green screen was used sparingly to solve otherwise impossible problems. It’s an approach that appeases the old-school movie fans among us while honoring the raw nature of the older Mortal Kombat games which typically emphasized visceral visuals over more refined sensibilities.

The Mortal Kombat movie actually finds a fascinating middle ground between those concepts. For instance, the film’s costumes showcase the kind of wear and tear that you’d expect to see in outfits worn by warriors locked in an eternal battle, but they’re also designed to not only honor cultural concepts but the idea that some of this armor was designed to be somewhat ornamental at one point in time. They’re refined but appropriately ugly.

The film’s weapons are really on another level. Weapons have become increasingly important to the Mortal Kombat fighting styles over the years, and this film honors that concept through an arsenal of carefully constructed instruments of death that somehow treat even the most seemingly impractical of weapons with a logic that has perhaps only previously been dwelled on by the series’ biggest fans.

No detail was overlooked in pursuit of making sure every character had a weapon that the actor could hold in their hand and feel the power of. From ornate katanas to swords made of ice, the props team clearly fell in love with the opportunity to make even the absurd a reality. We even saw a garden gnome suspiciously snuck into the small arsenal they had crafted. 

Again, though, what stood out most is the prop team’s insistence that many of these weapons didn’t just need to look good on-screen. Many of them needed to be balanced and practical enough to be used in battle simply because many of them were actually going to be used in the film’s fight scenes. I don’t know how the weapon designs will come across in the final film, but my gut feeling is that the fight scenes that they allow for will immediately be appreciated.

One other area where those efforts will almost certainly be immediately appreciated by everyone watching the movie is the makeup and practical effects. The makeup trailer I stepped in was loaded with masks, body parts, and the carnage of many early morning marathon makeup sessions. It looked closer to a horror movie than an action film or video game adaptation. That should be music to the ears of any fans that recognize that one of the things that helped the Mortal Kombat series stand out over the years are the horror tones that were used to help craft characters, stages, and most certainly the fatalities. 

While we weren’t treated to a fatality viewing while on-set, the team was good enough to describe an exploding head that they were working on for an upcoming shoot. Where that exploding head will rank among the best of all-time (a list that includes films like Scanners, Maniac, and The Prowler) remains to be seen, but their approach sounded fascinating. By utilizing a silicone glass head filled with blood and guts and triggered by an air cannon, the scene figures to pay homage to the techniques of the best such effects of old while utilizing modern advancements designed out of necessity and perhaps a desire to help raise the bar. 

It wasn’t long into my trip that the cast and crew emphasized the number of practical effects being utilized, and I certainly understand why. They not only look great, but the fact that so much effort went into ensuring these design elements offer something so much more than good looks seems to perfectly capture the spirit of the movie’s mission to make something that is so much more than it has to be.

Flawless Victory?

If the biggest “advantage” of low expectations is the idea that even lesser efforts can somehow exceed them, then the biggest disadvantage of the expectations set by many live-action video game movies to date is getting people to genuinely feel excited. There’s a big difference between crafting something that makes you think “That could have been worse,” and making a movie that inspires the genuine belief that this isn’t just going to be something different; this is going to be something special. 

The highest compliment I can pay to Mortal Kombat is that the genuine excitement expressed by everyone on-set went well beyond a cast and crew that were just happy to be there or felt that what they were doing was good enough. From those who couldn’t wait to play some of their favorite characters to those who were eager to finally showcase what they do best via a production that’s scale equaled the scope of their talents, there was a smile on everyone’s face as they told you what they were working on with the full knowledge that what they were about to say was something so far beyond what you expected. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

I don’t know if Mortal Kombat will “break the curse.” I don’t even know if it will satisfy a legion of MK fans who have had their expectations forever raised by the recent games’ own increasingly cinematic efforts. What I can tell you is that it’s ok to feel excited about Mortal Kombat. Actually, you probably should be excited about Mortal Kombat. I can assure you that everyone working on the film very much is. That, in and of itself, is a victory.

The post Inside the Mortal Kombat Movie’s Bloody Love Letter to Martial Arts appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3kGV41W

[dear-space-cadet]

10 Questions Tag

thanks @musicofglassandwords for the tag!

1. Do you conciously take inspiration from authors or books you love, or from your genres? Or do you actively try to avoid it?

Honestly, yeah, I do. Considering my ventures into sports journalism, I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Jon Bois and the SB Nation gang, most prominently the Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles. It has that exact level of surrealist realism that I aim for in my writing and that and 17776 kind of been the holy grail of inspiration for my recent writing. I kind of feel like I’m plagiarizing because Jon Bois is the only writer in the game doing surrealist sports writing, but hey, he’s a football guy and I’m a basketball guy, and he’s never written about a mascot that is out to kill the players it represents, and I don’t think he’s ever written Ersan Ilyasova as a monster hunter, either. But still. Holy grail of inspiration.

2. Do you write fanfiction, do roleplaying, or other kinds of fan activity? How do these things influence the way you create original work? Do you feel they’ve given you valuable “tools” in your “creative toolbox?”

Yes, I write fanfiction. And I’m proud of it. I’ve been writing fanfiction since I was eleven years old writing a Warrior Cats spin-off series. Nothing has helped me in the writing world more than writing fanfiction, because the world building and development is done, so you can just screw around and do basically whatever you want with it. Most of my fanfictions end up being somewhere in the realm of surrealism, realistic sci-fi/fantasy, or just straight up, old fashioned realistic fiction with some wacky variable pulled in, like, they’re all suddenly in art school *cough* itao. Fanfiction is so much fun to write, too, and it helps you learn things like plot structure, character arcs/development, and how to write an original story, especially while working in the world of something already established.

Even for nonfiction writing, fanfiction helps you figure out things like sentence structure and narrative while playing around in a completely inconsequential world. I think fanfiction might be the most valuable tool you can have as any kind of writer.

3. Do you use WorldAnvil (or something like it) for worldbuilding purposes, or do you prefer to use your own methods/systems for worldbuilding?

Nah. Most of my worldbuilding is adapted from the real world when I worldbuild anyway, because even when I delve into sci-fi/fantasy I like to keep it mostly realistic to the standards set on earth.

4. How do you choose your characters’ appearences? Do you use generators, choose face claims, make sketches, or something else?

I usually just look around on Pinterest for someone who vaguely matches the depiction I already have in my head. My characterizations can change on a whim, though, like if I see a tiktok of someone with a character’s very specific energy sometimes I can change their appearance just based on that.

5. What are your favorite tropes to read about or watch? Are they the same as the tropes you yourself most like to use in your writing?

I love whump and hurt/comfort. Even if I don’t mean to, my stories ALWAYS incorporate aspects of whump and hurt/comfort. There’s basically no escape. I love reading it, and I love writing it so I can read it later, and it’s such a habit to write it that it always just ends up being a plot point. I always have sort of a designated whumpee as well and they’re always the exact same archetype of character: that caring but silly romantic-comic relief character. Whether it’s Constantine in Forever and Ever, Amen or Andy in Sleep It Off, it’s always the exact same archetype. I’d like to switch it up but it’s always about liking what I’m writing, and I’m just not tired of this yet. Yes, most of my fics are this way as well and you can definitely pick out the archetype, but considering the vast majority of my fics are real person fanfiction, I’m not going to name names or anything.

6. Do you have a network of writer friends offline, such as a school club, writing workshop partners, etc.?

No, sadly. I have a couple writer friends and an English teacher I’m close with and I harass people for feedback but that’s really it. I’m hoping to find a community in college, though.

7. When looking for inspiration for a story, are you more likely to be drawn to visual or auditory elements? (Ex: would you browse through picture prompts, listen to music, seek out a written prompt, or something else?)

Music, always. Forever and Ever, Amen was inspired by a daydream I had while listening to Franz Ferdinand’s “Outsiders” one day on my way to school in my junior year of high school. You can listen to Caldwell and Constantine’s playlist here, if you want, because it was such an integral part of their story design.

8. Are the names of your characters and the places in your world important to you? How do you choose them?

My characters’ names usually just sort of pop up. When I was first making characters I always used sites like NameBerry to perfectly calculate a name: Polaris and Juneau and their whole little squad are total examples of this. When I introduced the Sideline Warriors, their names were all sort of randomly picked from wherever. Jacy just sort of came to me, Veridis and Voyager were Daft Punk songs, I’m an Aries, so screw it, there’s Aries. Most of the characters from Sleep It Off were either adapted in some way from real life, Kira being a slight misspelling of her inspiration’s name, Axel being named after the emo kid living in my head, Chuck being sort of a hint at my old crush, or they were adapted from songs, like Khalil (Khalil Gibran - STRFKR), Valencia (O, Valencia! - The Decemberists), and Andy (San Andreas - CVLTRALIGHT). Their names are always important, though, and I try not to reuse names as best as I can.

9. Do you utilize any personality types or tests to determine your characters’ personality, like Meyers-Briggs, enegrams, character archetypes, the four temperaments, alignment charts, the elements, Hogwarts houses, or even various types of astrology (Western Zodiac, Celtic tree, Chinese zodiac, etc.?)

I really don’t, but I definitely think about zodiac signs when choosing birthdays. Claudia is such a Taurus. Kira is a Virgo. Axel is an Aries. Andy’s a Capricorn because January 23rd came to me in a dream. Constantine is such a Leo, and Caldwell’s obviously a Pisces. You can kind of see this in each character’s personality so it’s always decided after their initial creation as a character. Make sense?

10. What is your favorite part of worldbuilding? (Ex: building cultures, mapmaking, history and timeline work, making conlangs, religion and mythology, plant and animal making, magic and technology systems…)

Most of my worldbuilding is meant to fit into the “real world,” so my favorite part of worldbuilding is probably odd quirks, like in Shitty Sixers Fanfiction, for example, Furkan Korkmaz freezing up whenever you make direct eye contact with him, or the fact that the team lives in Wells Fargo Center and lines up for Arby’s every morning, or the new NBA team called the Omaha Gophers featuring Jeremy Lin and Jimmer Fredette. It’s fun to give the story’s world its own little quirks and things specific to that universe, even if it’s fanfiction.

—

tagging @kindofwriter @klywrites @kiraawrites @fruzsiwrites @baconkat02 @h-faith-marr-writeblr @necros-writings @mercutioswriting ! use the same questions bc they’re lots of fun

[fmdtaeyongarchive]

↬ i drank up all the memories.

date: spring 2019.

location: seoul, south korea.

word count: 1,813 words.

summary: n/a.

notes: creative claims verification. alcohol tw + substance abuse tw. also trigger warning for ash mentally romanticizing his own (and others’, i guess?) substance abuse tendencies. please don’t read this. it might be my worst verification yet.

ash’s drink of choice was a good strong whiskey, but the first drink he’d ever had had been wine. it’d been at a dinner party his parents held and they’d let him sneak a sip. it’d been entirely un-scandalous and about the furthest thing from rebellion possible, but at the time it had felt like the thrill of his life. thirteen years old and unaccustomed to the effects of alcohol besides the way it stung when disinfecting a cut, he had been taken aback by the fizzing sting it brought over his tongue and throat. it wasn’t as bad as it looked when he saw people on television throwing back shot glasses of tequila, but he hadn’t understood at the time why anyone would like it that much. it didn’t taste any better than any other beverage and being drunk couldn’t be that wonderful, he’d naively thought.

now, wine was a drink ash found to be dull. even the most expensive wines weren’t all that amazing in pure taste, and once he’d become a regular drinker, he’d learned it wasn’t about the taste unless you were a wine connoisseur, and that wasn’t a career path ash was going to be going down any time soon. if he wanted to let go of his inhibitions and worries, which was generally the only reason he drank, there were options that were much more effective by the fluid ounce. outside of formal occasions and dinners with mixed company, wine was the drink he only broke out when he wanted to torture himself with the slow burn to a hazy mind instead of the fast and easy path.

ash was a masochist certainly. that wasn’t news to him. he knew all about the difference between the slow pain-easing journey of getting drunk off of wine in place of the fast and burning pain of downing the highest alcohol content shot he could get his hands on. perhaps he should enjoy wine more because of that, but, as a masochist, most nights, he wanted it fast. he didn’t drink for the journey anymore.

yet, there was something to be said for the imagery of someone drowning their melancholy in the gradual fever of a red wine. it was a scene that had been brought to life in many a movie, and it was while watching a movie reclining in his mostly unused living room couch that inspiration struck him for the song. as happened so often in movies that capitalized on dramatic love stories, a man sat in a chair in the dark of his apartment, glass of wine in his hand as he looked over the scenic view of whatever city the film was supposed to be set in. it wasn’t the first time ash had seen the movie, but he’d forgotten the details of the setting as he let the predictable story wash over him unanalyzed.

that had been ash years ago. the drinking age in korea being years lower than in the states had been a helpful accompaniment to the way he’d started young with heartbreak, too.

ash didn’t jump on the song the minute it began to sprout in his mind, but as the first movie turned into another in the mindless marathon of romantic dramas, another similar scene appeared like a sign. this time, the man had chosen a bar as a setting for his melancholy and ash couldn’t stop his brain from gnawing away at the truth behind the cliche. it was easy to drown one’s pain in a drink. ash had done it more times than he could count.

it was after the second scene that ash paused the television and followed the familiar path to his studio. the movie could wait for later, or never if he didn’t feel like coming back to it later, but in the midst of writing an album, any inspiration for a song that came to him so easily needed to be taken advantage of. there were so many nights spent in his own studio on his own or a studio at bc with other producers, brainstorming uselessly for an idea that could spark motivation that forgoing such a convenient offering of lyrical theme would be neglectful of him.

ash slid into the cool seat of his studio chair and pressed the computer on, ideas pulling at the strings of his brain so strongly that he began testing out pressing down chords on the keyboard that wasn’t capable of transferring any of it into sound yet. he heard the keys in his head as he acted out the chord structure and rhythm. he was aiming for the sound of a piano player in a jazz bar, fading into the distance while echoing in the listeners head. ash hadn’t been to many jazz bars in his time. cinema seemed to overestimate their popularity, or there was simply a major discrepancy between their abundance in american cities and seoul. film had taught him the cinematic atmosphere of one, though, and he had enough experience plucking out jazz piano music that it wasn’t too daunting of a feat for him to create a r&b chord progression to play around over top of a more freeform and clashing, tinny piano that would ring out underneath the base melody. throw in some low bass strings and a hollow drum pattern and he had a soundscape to work with before he’d even had time to create a musical outline in his mind. instead, it had all come together naturally based on the setting in his head.

there was a slow burn groove to the composition that teetered on the line between a song that could play under the witty, flirtatious exchange of dialogue during the first meeting between two fated partners in a film just as well as it could play under the scene of one half of the pair seated alone in the same bar months or years later when the passionate affair had completely fallen apart with only treacherous memories and glasses of wine left to poison the mind.

it all played out in his head faster than he could transfer it into his music program, but by the time the sun began to rise outside of his building in the morning—not that he could see it within his studio with its meticulously blacked-out windows—ash was left with an instrumental that had full potential to be turned into something. before he left the studio to shower and get dressed for his schedules for the day, sleep be damned, ash sent the instrumental out to one of his producer contacts for feedback on what it needed to be complete. surely, he hadn’t been able to craft a fully fleshed out track in one night, but he didn’t want to wait and stress over the details for another several nights in a row when what he had now had come to him as such a simple strike of inspiration.

he returned to his studio two nights later and opened up the producer’s response. they’d praised his start, but provided their constructive criticism as ash had welcomed within his initial message. he’d also invited them to include their own edits to the track if they had time, but they hadn’t sent a new file back, either because they hadn’t had time or because they hadn’t found anything they didn’t trust ash wouldn’t fix himself. ash hoped the latter possibility was the truth, but to avoid getting too proud of his own work, he assumed the former. upon listening back to the file, ash played around with production elements that had sounded better in the moment than they did now before settling on contentedness with the track.

that’s where the lyrics came in. he already had a concept in mind and thought it’d been a few days since he’d watched the scenes that had inspired the song, the distance was good. he didn’t want to write words that were too built upon some director’s creative vision for fake characters in a dramatized love story. like most of his songs, ash wanted this one to be more personal than impersonal. placing himself too separate from his own music was a sure way to run into a creative roadblock in his brain, and he’d been told he needed to work on getting better at separating himself so that he could write more diverse music, but for now, he wasn’t looking to challenge himself with someone else’s story.

it had been a while since ash had gone through a break-up or a crack in a relationship big enough to leave him drowning his romantic sorrows in a glass, but if he searched far back enough into the nooks and crannies of his memories, he could gather a recollection of what that feeling had been like. drowning his sorrows in general was a feeling that required much less searching, so he focused in on the imagery of that as he began to sketch out lyrics ideas.

settling on the concept of the bitter memories floating in the wine itself, ash found the first verse of the song. it told a four line story of downing glass after glass of the history-laced liquid to make the past disappear into the abyss because the pain of holding on was too much.

the song then turned into a lament directed at a lover who couldn’t hear him. the false sense of security in shouting into the void while intoxicated had fooled ash once or twice, but the silence never talked back in the way he wanted. it never had the voice of the person he both ached to and feared hearing speak back, and there was both relief and hurt in that fact. instead, the silence only brought back the memories that he’d been so inelegantly trying to banish from his mind.

from misery to resoluteness, that was how the song’s tale ended. the pieces of a broken relationship couldn’t be patched together any easier than the shattered shards of a fragile wine glass, and that was a truth more bitter to swallow than the drink itself. no matter how hard it could be (and how bad ash was at it), it was something that had to be realized to move on.

no one could keep submerging the parts of their mind they wanted to ignore in wine forever. they either had to find a way to float or give in and drown. that was a thought that skirted over the surface of ash’s brain, only staying long enough to be incorporated into the lyrics before swiftly disappearing so as not to be dwelled on too long.

he had to put part of himself into every song, but he didn’t have to face the way those parts tried to look back on him in the mirror of his music.

[belittled-beast-blog]

Sea Of Thieves Servers Weren't Prepared For So Many Players

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If you want to try out Sea of Thieves for totally free, you can do a 14-day trial of Xbox Game Pass Every single how to download sea of thevies Xbox Game Pass member gets cost-free access to Microsoft Studios games, including brand new ones like Sea of Thieves. Excellent luck signing in. When Sea of Thieves clicks, most most likely since you have a full galleon of fellow pirates to operate with, it can develop a rousing, fun knowledge whether or not completing a extended voyage for the Gold Hoarders or even just sailing around, seeking for any hidden secrets or loot. But eliminate How to Download Sea of Thevies that and becomes clear that you have a game with tiny in the way or content or range. It's nevertheless decent, of course, but it really is absolutely nothing to create house about with out a group.

[amisbro]

Final thoughts on...

The Shining Live update OOOH BOY! First off let me be VERY CLEAR that everything in this post is my opinion and that is all.  I do not expect people to agree with it but this opinion piece is coming from someone that enjoys a wide variety of games and they like to see when devs listen to feedback.  I am sad to say I don’t think that happened here. So for the past 6 days or so we in the Shining Live fandom were treated to 6 days worth of new features that were going to be added in the game.  The timing on the East Coast was odd af because for some reason the devs decided that 5 AM in the morning here on the East Coast was as good a time as any (as oppose to say Midnight/1 AM when a normal event would start) when probably a good amount of people in their audience might have still been asleep.  Don’t get me wrong as we know that Broccoli has a habit of releasing major news “under the cover of darkness” but 5 AM was just odd! When I read the first one I admit that one didn’t bother me and to be honest it still doesn’t.  The idea of expanding the Memorial board to include Photgraphs and such I am okay with.  Not ENTIRELY THRILLED considering that now it just leads to arguably more needless grinding (and the gem totals are ridiculous as all hell) but we make do with it because of “reasons”. Where I started to take issue with the game was when they said they would incorporate the idea of a “Score Battle” and “Crown Challenge”.  To me neither of these made sense to add cos it was just another needless grinding event that shows they didn’t really think about the players that didn’t care about these types of things.  Most of us just wanted to have the story continue so giving us these kinds of challenges was like “Huh?!” The 4th one I could have taken or left but the idea of expanding the voice lines...okay?!  Like there might be people that wanted this and that’s cool...the problem is that to me it was more cosmetic just like the all the updates really.  Like I said I had no problem with adding the expansion to the memorial board but the VERY LEAST they could have done there is not make the prices so high to be able to get the next parts.  I get for UR and SRs fine but RAREs...ffs mang! The addition of the songs that were put in the campaign is cool.  Like its cool to have ML2K and Poison Kiss added but we know those songs PROBABLY aren’t going to be story songs any time soon...or at the very least NOT till after the S1 singles come out in the game because it doesn’t make sense storywise...then again we DO have ML1K (regular) in the game LONG BEFORE the singles so anything is possible. Running the commercials in Japan is fine but are they going to be running the Global version ads over there?  That almost makes no sense to me cos it seems like they SHOULD be advertising it HERE but that’s just me The idea of giving away free 11 pulls is cool...the issue is its supposed to be 1 day for 5 days (unless I missed something) and well...I got my first one when I got up yesterday but I thought that would reset after 3PM my time for #2 (this is something they do with events where you get the event login bonus when the event starts and then at the login time) but no luck...I guess I have to wait till 3 PM today to get it but then again they didn’t specify. The real kick in the jewels is that when you look at the idea of the 11 pulls (10 is TsukiPara...gotta remember that) a lot of Global fans wanted the past event cards in it.  KLab KNOWS THIS because they have to have seen the remarks under the updates hoping they would get that.  I know some fans want HEAVENS (as do I) but I’m going to be patient on that...the timeline hasn’t granted us the proper time to do it yet (and yes this is even WITH QN in the game already). what is going to be really interesting is to see when they try to do the next “major update” because in 2 months is 8th Anniversary.  I have said I thought a huge update was coming THEN because of the fact that Broc always announces big stuff coming for the franchise and then we got this update.  Does that mean that we WON’T see a Summer Update?  Well no because think about this This update was done in the end of April...think about the way Japan releases their Animes for the different seasons IN JAPAN the seasons for new programmes can go something like this Winter - January to about the end of March Spring - Early April to about the End of June Summer - The beginning of July to about the end of September Autumn - Early October to the end of the year Now why do I bring this up? Well its possible that since they did this update they might want to wait a good bit.  3 months is a good amount of time but what if they wanted to make the next update around November.  Well what (potentially) could be out around then? The HEAVENS Movie single! Its known that right now we have not heard hide nor hair about the movie but that might be coming to an end in about 9 days tine.  If that’s the case consider this part of the post invalid but the fact is that we haven’t so right now its a very interesting time. As for Shining Live things aren’t looking too good...well for me they are fine right now cos I’m over yonder in another part of the gaming world rocking out to tunes with my boys from TsukiPro and enjoying life.  That said do I think that the game has a chance after this “popcorn fart” of an update?  Well yeah but we have to get there and I’m sorry to say...I do think we are in for a very long and depressing wait for that to happen!

[jaykong99-blog]

IDEATION AND CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING

During my time in Ideation I studied the ways in which you can stimulate your mind into thinking more creatively. The ability to think creatively is “not a talent. It is a way of operating” according to John Cleese. I found that we can do different activities and we can go through different processes in order to train your mind into thinking more creatively.

Collaboration  

 In the Collaboration session we examined the way in which working together in groups and pairs can influence our mind into thinking more creatively. In class we worked together to construct towers made from toothpicks and marshmallows. We were challenged to see how high we could make the construction. Before we created it, we discussed our opinions and as a collective we formed an approach we wished to take when we started to make it. We had to take into consideration the weight aspect of the marshmallows as well as the time we had to complete the task. A quote from Twyla Tharp states that “people who are practiced in collaboration will do better than those who insist on their individuality”, this quote supports the idea of collaboration and suggests that those who are keen to work alone and are autocratic miss out on the heights you can reach working together.

   One way we can inspire creativity is by working in collaboration with other people as it allows us to open our mind up to other ideas, ideas that we may not be able to think of if we worked independently. When working collaboratively it is integral to the steps of ideation to listen to other opinions and to take them on board rather than neglect them. It is from this we are able to take ideas and improve on them. The ways in which we are able to improve on these ideas in a group is by brainstorming thoughts. We then draw the positives from all of the suggestions and can devise a way of which we can tackle the problem.

I believe collaboration is a very effective method of ideation as it allows you to optimise efficiency as well as creativity. The underlying theory of collaboration suggests that everything you do alone can be done better as a collective. Helen Keller says, "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." Working with peers allows you to also be more time efficient, the spare time gained from teamwork means you have more time to plan ideas. For example, when we attempted to make a toothpick and marshmallow phenomenon in class, we were able to compartmentalize jobs between the group. This meant that we were each able to focus on our own individual tasks allowing us to put more thought and care into what we were doing, resulting in better results.

Everyone has different life experiences. Working in a group is a hugely beneficial method of ideation as you are able to gain knowledge or ideas from peers. This can be reciprocated as collaboration involves giving ideas as well. We may have an idea which needs a lot of adjustment or maybe just a little refining, idea’s may also be incomplete. Those who collaborate effectively will be able to use the cumulative knowledge to their advantage. By working with others, you are able to get a better idea of what you are doing. Moreover, by working collaboratively you immediately have a larger skillset at your disposal and from working together weaknesses may become strengths.

A study shows that working with others benefits our motivation and we may get greater enjoyment from the task. This leads to higher levels of performance within the group. Getting feedback on idea’s may motivate an individual further as they can feel more confident and thus more creative with their work. Scientist, Gregory Walton said that “Simply feeling like you’re part of a team of people working on a task makes people more motivated as they take on challenges”. Problems can be solved.

The skills I have learnt from this class can be easily transferred to any type of collaborative work. For example, working in a group to construct a story will ask for the same skills such as communication, teamwork and decision making. I thoroughly enjoy collaborating with friends and peers on projects as I believe creativity flows at its best when you are able to give and receive feedback. It is from the constructive criticism we receive from peers that we are able to improve on ideas. I could possibly collaborate with someone in the future if I am unable to use a certain software. So, by finding someone to collaborate with who can use a particular software I would be extending the lengths that imagination and creativity could go.

                                                                                              Improvisation

 Another effective way of inspiring creativity is by improvising. In this class we went through a number of different exercises one of them being, “Fake it ‘till you make it”. The basis of this game is that you have to stand in front of the group and attempt to talk like an expert in whatever topic you are given. We also played a game called Statements and Questions. The game involves two teams and every round one player is selected to go face to face with a member of the opposing team. They are then given one of two possibilities, statements or questions. For example, if questions are selected for that round the players take it in turns to say a question each without hesitation or repeating anything said. We continued to improvise in the Wednesday lesson, one task we were given was to design an experience of connection for the group using the materials in the room. My group decided to make a vehicle using the chairs and we led the group around the classroom in the makeshift car. Another exercise we took part in involved describing your life story with a partner using facts, shapes, colours and personal preferences. The exercise started off with us standing up telling our partner facts about our life, then sitting back to back discussing our interests and hobbies and lastly, the task involved lying down describing our life story with our partner using only shapes and colours.

Being put in a situation where you may not feel entirely comfortable forces creativity out of you, from adapting and working spontaneously we obtain irrational thoughts and ideas. This method of ideation allows you to generate random ideas that may be quite small at first, but you are then able to build on them. I found that improvising helps you to warm up your mind and gives you a creative flow. Ideas are generated faster and are of better quality when ideating using improvisation.

Improvisation teaches us to say yes to doing things, no matter how bizarre it may be. It puts us in the habit of accepting challenges and giving things a go. From this we are able to face bigger challenges without hesitation. It teaches us to fully participate in the activities we take part in without the fear of being wrong. This allows our mind to think outside the box and acting purely on impulse we create a scenario etc. “Fake it ‘till you make it” was one exercise we used improvisation in, and it required us to fake being an expert at something. This sort of activity could be replicated with different criteria to inspire creative thoughts. For example, using this exercise for a comedic purpose could work.

Being out of your comfort zone means you have to adapt to the situation, using only instinct. Improvisation requires intuition. You are able to train your improvisation skills and they can be used to help creatively imagine ways of which you can overcome a particular problem. Improvisation teaches us to act on impulse and as we better our improvisational skills we may find it easier to tackle new issues at hand as our intuition does the work for us.

A study that supports the effectiveness of ideating using improvisation was conducted by Dr. Charles Limb, he used an fMRI scan to check the brain activity of a Jazz musician while they played a memorised piece and also an improvised one. The studies show that when the musician’s played the improvised piece, self-expression rose. Limb found that an area of the brain associated with the fear of failure was shut down, meaning the musicians were more creative.

I enjoy writing fictional stories, so I believe improvisation is important when trying to start the story or maybe getting the initial idea. A quote by Harvey Keitel states that, “To create characters, one must build background and one of the tools we use is improvisation.” Thinking of characters and plots are not straightforward and those ideas do not come instantly. Through improvisation we can create situations we’d find our characters in and I believe that from this you are able to identify important factors such as personality traits and motives. It is from improvisation you are able to truly understand who it is your writing about. Life is not black and white and often in everyday life you come up against a problem that you aren’t used to, the skill of being able to adapt is a prime aspect in improvisation and can easily be applied to a project or just life in general.

Creativity and the Unconscious

 The relationship between the unconscious mind and creativity is another theory we looked into and is another method of ideating. In this class we did an exercise that started off with us each choosing our own letter from the alphabet and writing it down, we then wrote down a word beginning with that letter. From this we listed words associated with the word we wrote down, followed by writing a paragraph connected to a story in our lives using two words from the list. We then continued the story using elements of what we had learnt about life from other subjects and different fields. This was added to with another paragraph of our own wisdom and thoughts. After this exercise we were tasked with writing a poem using standard poetic techniques such as similes and rhyme etc. The last activity we did involved us listening to a partner’s dream and writing down a few of the most prominent features and then designing a game that could incorporate the features.

The theory is all about allowing our subconscious and unconscious mind to find the solution to what we are looking for. It involves using intuition, which hides behind our consciousness, Robert Moore said “You cannot control creativity, you can only dance with it.” This supports the idea that the ability to be creative cannot actually be controlled by the subconscious, but it is in fact more spontaneous and random. The initial exercise which involved us writing random words associating with a certain letter and later developing on it with other specific criteria. We then used the ideas generated in the previous task to create a poem and I believe this initial exercise allowed me to write a poem with ease. The initial idea for the poem was thought of quite fast and from then on, the vocabulary I was looking for in each line just came to me. This form of ideating is effective as it essentially warms up your brain before you move onto the actual task.

The unconscious mind is also a place where we are able to think creatively with a lot of freedom. Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” of which he credits the song to the creative process we have when we sleep. When we are in the unconscious, we may experience something we know as REM sleep. During REM sleep our brains are more active and this can result in intense dreams. In these dreams our unconscious mind pieces together bits of information and events that have occurred in our life. The university of Berkeley conducted a study of REM sleep and found that the brains problem solving capacity was 15-35% more effective than its ability to solve the same issues while awake. Another task we completed in task involved us using ideas and thoughts from our dreams and incorporating them into a video game poster. So instead of trying to consciously think of a new game idea we allowed our unconscious mind to do the work for us.

In a video for Big Think Dr Barry Kaufman states that “Great creativity doesn’t come when we’re just solely rationally consciously focused on solving a creative problem.” Kaufman says that we rarely find the answer we are looking for when we try and consciously attempt to figure it out, but when we distract our minds with something else, we often find solutions. When you remove yourself from the situation your subconscious tries to solve the problem at hand. All of the ideas formed by the subconscious mind stay in the subconscious until they are close to the point of finding an answer. The idea then springs into the conscious mind when the idea is finally solved.

I believe I would apply this theory to future tasks and problems as it teaches you to not just rely on conscious thoughts but to also appreciate the idea’s we generate from our unconscious mind. A study shows that 95% of our brain’s activities are performed in a non-conscious manner. We are often not able to recall dreams, but you are able to train your mind into remembering them. One way of doing this is by having a dream diary. If we are able to train our minds into remembering dreams, we can maximise creativity and fully utilise the creativeness that exists within our unconscious mind.

                                                                                    LEGO Serious Play

In this class we recalled the games we used to play as children, and we looked at the features these games included. We were instructed to build a duck using seven LEGO pieces, followed by removing three pieces and explaining how it could still be perceived as a duck. We then had to build a creature of any kind and then later would change the creature to show how it could represent yourself on a Monday morning. After this we were told to create anything we wanted to, followed by making something which was a metaphor for your relationship with coding and then we worked in pairs to create a metaphor for a successful student at university.

The theory of Serious Play is that from playing with toys such as LEGO we can improve on our creativity. Lego Serious Play challenges you to think more imaginatively as you have to use limited resources to try and convey different messages and meanings. The guidelines of LEGO serious play can be similar to the ones we have when starting a project. You are confined to work with what you have in front of you, so you are forced into thinking imaginatively.

“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.” This quote by John Cleese supports the idea of LEGO Serious Play. It suggests that without actually being able to play around with things it is hard to be creative. It requires a physical, hands on approach. Being able to have the creative space to work will allow for better productivity and more

By starting off by building a basic idea such as the duck then moving onto creating a creature it aids the brain into generating more creative ideas. This could be linked with the study of the unconscious mind and ideation. The tasks then move onto more complex proposals such as creating something which may be a metaphor for success. Gradually increasing the difficulty of what you are trying to portray whether it be a scenario, or an object it will allow your mind to think more creatively for the harder tasks.

The steps for LEGO Serious Play involve having a question and building on it, then presenting it and telling the story behind it. This is then followed by questions and reflections. The steps found in this theory can be compared to the thought process of any idea a problem or when trying to solve a problem. Seymour Papert believed that when people are assigned to create something, they would in learn more effectively.

LEGO Serious Play teaches us to have fun and to work with what we have. What I learnt from this theory I could apply to different situations I may be faced with. For example, if I was trying to complete a project where I’m using software I am unfamiliar with. Instead of going straight into it I would play around with a smaller idea. From this I could learn more about the software and it might have inspired an idea for the bigger project. I believe LEGO Serious play could also be applied very effectively when story building, as you can visualise scenery and characters. The ideas aligned with LEGO Serious Play could be applied when working on product design as it goes through stages of prototyping designs and then explaining what you have made.

                                                                                                                                            References

Cleese, J. (2019) TOP 25 QUOTES BY JOHN CLEESE (of 191) | A-Z Quotes, A-Z Quotes. Available at: https://www.azquotes.com/author/2973-John_Cleese (Accessed: 16 May 2019).

Tharp, T. (2019) Collaborations, ROBERT DIAZ DIAZ. Available at: https://robertdiazdiaz.com/collaborations-2/ (Accessed: 16 May 2019).

M. Walton, D. (2019) Just Feeling Like Part of a Team Increases Motivation on Challenging Tasks, Association for Psychological Science. Available at: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/just-feeling-like-part-of-a-team-increases-motivation-on-challenging-tasks.html (Accessed: 17 May 2019).

Mumaw, S. (2019) Comedy Improv Training: Ideation Central, HOW Design. Available at: https://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/comedy-improv-training/ (Accessed: 17 May 2019).

Keitel, H. (2019) Improvisation Quotes - BrainyQuote, BrainyQuote. Available at: https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/improvisation (Accessed: 17 May 2019).

Barry Kaufman, D. (2019) Creativity is the subconscious mind combined with intuition and rationality, Big Think. Available at: https://bigthink.com/videos/scott-barry-kaufman-on-intuition-and-rationality (Accessed: 17 May 2019).

Kearney, D. (2019) Dreams, Creativity and how they are Connected, Fluid UI - Unlocking the world's creativity. Available at: https://blog.fluidui.com/dreams-creativity-and-how-they-are-connected/ (Accessed: 18 May 2019).

Rymenant, M. (2019) 95 percent of brain activity is beyond our conscious awareness, Neurosciences UX. Available at: http://www.simplifyinginterfaces.com/2008/08/01/95-percent-of-brain-activity-is-beyond-our-conscious-awareness/ (Accessed: 18 May 2019).

Cleese, J. (2019) John Cleese Quotes, BrainyQuote. Available at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/john_cleese_133998 (Accessed: 18 May 2019).

[entergamingxp]

After RuneScape’s controversial 2019, Jagex plots “direct and deliberate” changes for 2020 • Eurogamer.net

RuneScape was the introduction to the world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games for many gamers; where many of us met our first online friends and learnt about that MMORPG levelling grind from hours of fishing. Even if you’ve never played RuneScape, then you probably had a friend who did, or maybe there’s a chance that, like me, you’re still playing to this day.

I’ve been playing RuneScape, with the occasional break, for over 13 years. Throughout these years I’ve witnessed both the lows, such as the removal of PvP in the Wilderness between 2007 to 2011, and the highs, such as the release of Old School RuneScape in 2013. I’ve completed fantastic quests filled with rewarding challenges and great storylines (my favourites are Ritual of the Mahjarrent and While Guthix Sleeps). All the time I’ve spent in Gielinor also means I’ve seen the rise of microtransactions and monetisation in RuneScape.

As a subscription based game, RuneScape has had an element of pay-to-play since the membership program was first released in February 2002. Since then the membership cost has slowly risen, but it took 10 years for developer Jagex to introduce a new form of monetisation and it was called Squeal of Fortune.

The concept was simple – players could win prizes, coins for example, by spinning a wheel. Each player received a certain number of free spins each day, while additional spins could be earned in-game or purchased using real-world currency. Players were quick to criticise the new feature as being a form of real-world trading, which RuneScape has a long history of fighting against.

In April 2012, Jagex redefined the rule about real-world trading in RuneScape, stating: “Real-world trading is the term used for activities which occur outside of the game environment which result in the real-world sale or purchase of items, gold pieces or services with the intention of supplying or advancing a Jagex in-game character other than by the means which are incorporated into the game.” This change clarifies that real-world trading has to involve a third-party and that any form of monetisation owned by Jagex is omitted from this rule. But criticism of Squeal of Fortune continued, until it was replaced with Treasure Hunter in February 2014.

Treasure Hunter remains the current loot box system in RuneScape and has received similar criticism to Squeal of Fortune, due to players being able to purchase additional keys. It has also been criticised for creating a pay-to-win atmosphere, since many of its prizes, including a range of XP lamps (like genie lamps), supply players with large amount of experience they can spend on a skill of their choice. The focus of these arguments is using Treasure Hunter devalues both the scoreboad and the very act of skilling itself.

Buried Treasure – a Treasure Hunter promotion that ran in October and May 2019.

Player Redhorizon, who spoke to Eurogamer at RuneFest 2019, said: “Treasure Hunter was bad enough, but then you have the promotions that offer double experience.” At the time of writing, Jagex has run 49 Treasure Hunter promotions during 2019. The Bubbling Lamps promotion, for example, has run twice in 2019, first in February and then in June, rewarding players with a selection of special XP lamps. These lamps could be redeemed for either direct or bonus experience, allowing players to quickly gain experience in skills that typically take a lot of time to train, such as Summoning and Agility.

Bonds and Solomon’s General Store, two other forms of monetisation for RuneScape, have faced similar accusations from the player community. Bonds, which were introduced in 2013, can be traded between players in-game and redeemed for a variety of services, including membership and Treasure Hunter keys. Some players view Bonds as a form of real-world trading, since players must first purchase them using real-world currency.

Meanwhile, Solomon’s General Store, which absorbed the Loyalty Store in 2013, has faced the same criticism, since many of its items must be purchased using RuneCoin, which, again, can only be purchased using real-world currency. The store originally focused primarily on cosmetic items, such as hairstyles or pets, but now allows players to purchase services, such as Bank Booster Packs, through the use of RuneCoin. Like Treasure Hunter, these items encourage players to spend additional money and put those who can’t or choose not to at a disadvantage to those who do.

The front page for Solomon’s General Store.

Jagex also introduced an enhanced version of the membership subscription program in 2012, called Premier Club. This special form of membership can only be purchased in the latter months of each year, usually between November and January, and has three tiers for players to choose from: Bronze, Silver and Gold. Each tier supplies a different period of membership, from three months to a year, at a discounted rate and a variety of other bonuses, including new cosmetic items, a discount on RuneMetrics and additional Treasure Hunter keys.

RuneMetrics is an analytics tool, which was released in 2016, that can be accessed both in-game and through the RuneScape website. It has a variety of features, including both a wealth and experience tracker. If you want to use RuneMetrics to its full potential, then you have to purchase a £3.99-a-month subscription to RuneMetrics Pro, which is separate to your actual standard £6.99 RuneScape membership.

Finally, Jagex experimented with a battle pass inspired event in July 2018, called RunePass. This two-week long event involved players completing a variety of tasks to earn rewards and, in proper battle pass style, there were two reward tracks players could follow: a free track and a premium track, which was purchasable for 400 RuneCoins (around £7). RunePass was criticised by the player base for feeling more like an extension of the daily challenge system, rather than being its own, unique, event. The free track was also criticised for lacking substantial rewards.

Jagex was aware of the problems with RunePass, however, as senior product manager Matt Casey explained to Eurogamer: “It [RunePass] was probably a little bit rushed and we didn’t give it enough gestation time that resulted in a system that didn’t offer enough value for players. It didn’t have enough rewards and players felt it didn’t represent good value.” Casey added RunePass, and its successor Yak Track, are “part of a wider kind of initiative for us to look at how can we evolve our monetisation model and our strategy”.

For many years the arguments over the implementation of monetisation in RuneScape were confined to the game’s subreddit and forums, but in April 2019 Jagex gave oral evidence at the investigation into Immersive and Addictive Technologies run by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

Jon Goddard, head of corporate communications at Jagex, explained to Eurogamer that Jagex was approached “directly by the select committee to take part in the process and were invited to attend and give oral evidence directly to the committee”. Jagex was invited to appear before the select committee, because, Goddard explained, the company “leads in areas like player safety and player protection”. Jagex gave evidence alongside a variety of other game developers and social media companies, including EA, Epic Games and Instagram.

The report from this investigation was released on 12th September 2019. It included details on the weekly and monthly payment caps, £1000 and £5000 retrospectively, placed on players. Controversially, the report also included an anonymous complaint from the parents of an adult player, who had reportedly spent in excess of £50,000 on RuneScape. In the written evidence supplied by this anonymous individual, the complainant claimed their son “took out payday loans, bank loans and ‘max’d’ out a credit card”, and detailed how this “financially ruined our [their] retirement plans” as they had to pay off their son’s debt.

Once the committee investigated further, as evidenced in the minutes for the oral evidence given by Neil McClary, vice president of product and player strategy at Jagex, and Kelvin Plomer, director of player experience at Jagex, it became clear this figure is, in fact, closer to £17,000. Goddard explained, concerning this particular case: “We [Jagex] were unable to entirely corroborate the details that were submitted to the committee with our own records – there just wasn’t an exact match, so it’s very difficult when the complaint or the evidence is submitted by someone who is not the account holder themselves.”

Jagex is currently awaiting feedback from the committee, which has been delayed due to the general election. Goddard commented that, even though Jagex is waiting for the response, “not only are we in a strong position already to answer many of the suggestions they may make, but we’re also trying to be far ahead of it”, and “I don’t think that any business should sit back and think they do everything right when it comes to player support and player safety. That’s why we’re looking very, very proactively into what we can do and not just follow what we’re told to do, but lead in that area”.

Still, despite Jagex’s readiness to listen to the committee’s feedback, the report, and the evidence it held, reignited arguments about the place of monetisation and loot boxes in RuneScape, which encapsulate the discussion of these features in video games as a whole. Loot boxes and in-game currency stores may be described as optional, but the services and items they provide are attractive to players, particularly in live service games where there is often a pressure to maintain the same level of progress as the rest of the player community. RuneScape players can easily fall prey to this trap, because some of the game’s best content, such as quests or new locations, are locked behind high skill requirements.

It’s also impossible to avoid the microtransactions that exist in RuneScape. Every time you log in to the game you’re taken to the lobby. Here you’ll find adverts for the latest deals in Solomon’s General Store or the Treasure Hunter promotion. Once you enter the game itself, an icon to open Treasure Hunter will appear in the top-left hand corner of your screen, which you have to manually close. The temptation to spend is always present and it shouldn’t be.

The login lobby for RuneScape.

The question Jagex is tackling now is, how does it regain the trust of players who’ve become disenchanted with its implementation of monetisation? Jagex’s answer is a willingness to experiment with both its live events and monetisation methods, with the goal of evolving beyond the current loot box system to one that is more appealing to players. This will also include revitalising and reworking older forms of monetisation, such as Solomon’s General Store, over the coming years. Matt Casey said the aim of restructuring the monetisation with RuneScape is: “We want players to feel any content they paid for is done in a generous way, represents good value for money, and we want to be transparent with those systems.”

If you play RuneScape, then you will have noticed the first of these experiments has already occurred. From 22nd November to 2nd December 2019, RuneScape ran a reworked version of its Double XP weekend. The difference being that, rather than having the event occur over the actual weekend, each player was instead given an allotted 36 hours of double XP to use throughout this week. This innovation, according to Casey, received a positive response from the community: “We got the right balance of players who wanted to min max it and not lose out, but, at the same time, feel like they have the choice of when to play.”

This observation is certainly true; a large percentage of RuneScape players have been playing for five to 10 years and, as their lives become more complicated, the time they have for playing RuneScape dwindles. The re-imagining of the Double XP weekend allowed these players to take advantage of the event’s bonuses without having to schedule their life around RuneScape, preventing what was meant to be a fun event from becoming an inconvenience.

The riskier experiment, however, was Count Yakula’s Yak Track. As mentioned, the game’s previous attempt at a battle pass-like system, RunePass, wasn’t well received by players, leading to feedback from both the player community and internally at Jagex that helped play a major role in the creation of Yak Track. This was the right decision because, compared to RunePass, Yak Track is clearly the superior event in terms of both the rewards on offer and, most importantly, the tasks you complete to earn them.

Unlike RunePass, where each player was given a series of daily tasks depending on which track they were on, each tier in the Yak Track has two dedicated tasks for you to pick from. These can either be skill-based tasks, which scale to your level in that particular skill, or an activity task, like picking cabbages near Port Sarim. This change ensures the Yak Track feels like a new piece of content, rather than just an extension of the daily challenges, especially since many of the tasks can take multiple hours to complete. Other alterations, such as a wider variety of rewards, extending the length of the event from two weeks to six, and ensuring Premier Club members receive the premium track for free, have also helped it feel like a unique event instead of an encore of RunePass.

The Live Ops team also used Yak Track as an opportunity to release an experimental update to Treasure Hunter that let players see the content of some loot boxes before buying them. Casey described it as “a new feature that’s much more transparent, where players can still use their daily keys if they want to and they can still earn the same type of rewards, but it’s a much more open system that increases the amount of player control and choice”, and insists there’s “still an amount of randomisation in the prizes selected around them, then if you use a key, you’ll receive one of the prizes randomly, but you’ll be able to see what they are, so if you see something you really want, you’ll be able to go after it and get it”.

While this new features does give players an additional advantage when using Treasure Hunter, there will always be voices within the community that call for the removal of the loot box system entirely. It’s highly unlikely, however, that Jagex will pull Treasure Hunter from RuneScape due to the revenue it provides. What Casey did tell Eurogamer though is the Live Ops team plans to run a number of tests throughout 2020 to help “find the right balance and the right kind of mechanics” as part of their commitment to “evolving our model, moving away from a standard loot crate system”.

The new Farming Guild.

Aside from monetisation, another issue that plagued RuneScape throughout the late summer and early autumn months of 2019 was a lack of content.

Outside the release of The Land Out of Time, the majority of updates RuneScape experienced before November 2019 were focused around improving the game’s quality of life, such as Bank Placeholders and the Slayer Collection Log. Only three quests were released this year, and the planned Weapon Diversity update was unfortunately cancelled.

Weapon Diversity was a modernisation project in a similar vein to the Mining and Smithing rework, which was released at the beginning of 2019. When asked about the project’s cancellation by Eurogamer at RuneFest 2019, lead designer David Osborne explained: “It was meant to bring diversity to weapons so it feels different to have short swords, than it did to have a whip and it wasn’t doing that as well as it should. I’m glad I’m part of a game that decided, ‘No, we’re going to cancel that.’ Rather than just say we’ve put so much effort and sunk cost into this we want to launch it.”

We currently live in an era where some developers release content in games that contains multiple issues, which are slowly fixed via patches after their release. It’s refreshing to see Jagex decided against releasing an update it believed wasn’t performing to the correct standard. The unintentional problem, however, was there wasn’t anything to replace Weapon Diversity in the schedule. As Osborne said: “We cancelled that [Weapon Diversity] and it left a hole. What we need to get better at is having updates contingency.”

This content drought was brought to an end with the release of the Ranch Out of Time feature, and both the Farming and Herblore skills being raised to level 120, at the end of November. RuneScape also promises to start 2020 off strong with the release of its 28th skill, Archaeology, in January, which looks perfect for Gielinor lore nerds like myself. Yet, to ensure this content black hole doesn’t happen again, Jagex plans to temporarily increase the size of the RuneScape development team.

“We’re going to get a number of people that can help us develop a number of projects,” Osborne explained, “that means we have a contingency, so, if something like weapon diversity happens, as a subscriber you don’t feel like you have an empty gap.” Jagex will also create a subteam to work on developing new quests and remastering older elements of the game. The remastering subteam will begin with a rework of Managing Miscellenia, while the quest subteam will work on an Azzanadra quest.

The news of the quest subteam is especially welcome. For many players, the variety of quests available in RuneScape is one of the main reasons why they keep playing. You can join the rebellion against the vampyric lords in Morytania, uncover the secrets of the Elven race or find out why the penguins are acting suspiciously. There are even multiple murder mystery quests, including Murder Mystery, released in 2003, and The Needle Skips.

Quest development has slowed in the last couple of years, with four being released in 2018 and six in 2017, leaving the questers of RuneScape wanting. Hopefully the new quest subteam will create a new range of exciting quests, continuing the subversive, yet engaging, tone the game is known for. Two quests for 2020 have already been confirmed at RuneFest 2019: Desperate Measures, the sequel to Desperate Times, and a City of Sennitsten quest.

Jagex hasn’t, however, just created a selection of new subteams. It’s also increased the resources of all its major teams. Ryan Ward, executive producer for RuneScape, explained to Eurogamer: “We added resources to each of the teams and we actually had our teams focused on three different core areas: Live Ops, the Episodic Content and the Core Experiences.” Ward added he is now “trying to look forward and look at the 2020 vision and 2020 road map, align each of the efforts from Episodic Content, Core Experience and Live Ops, so they actually feed into each other and they make sense to each other”.

The hope is these additional resources should not only help increase the flow of content, but also support the experimentations with monetisation and Jagex’s short-term goal, as Ward described it, of having the “players experience and see the real direct and deliberate changes and that we’re in this regular cadence of feedback”. This also signals an increased focus on communication with players, in both the terms of player protection and listening to feedback.

Kharid Et and Everlight – two new locations created for the Archaeology skill.

The challenges awaiting RuneScape and Jagex in 2020 lie in how it develops its approach to monetisation and its efforts to regain the trust of its community. Personally, I’m optimistic about the future of RuneScape, as the foundation for these goals already appears to have been set. The creation of the subteams and additional resources for the pre-existing teams should hopefully ensure players in 2020 don’t experience a drop in content, while also helping new updates, such as Archaeology and the promised Elder God Wars dungeon, reach their full potential.

When it comes to monetisation, players are already experiencing the results of the Live Ops team’s desire to innovate in the form of the Yak Track. Only the coming year, however, can tell us whether this success will continue and if Jagex can meet Ward’s long term goal of becoming “where the industry looks for answers and solutions” for monetisation systems, with Jagex viewed as “the shining example of the gaming industry”.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2019/12/after-runescapes-controversial-2019-jagex-plots-direct-and-deliberate-changes-for-2020-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=after-runescapes-controversial-2019-jagex-plots-direct-and-deliberate-changes-for-2020-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[aimsanthonyabaye]

Final Reflection for Leadership Development 50199

Final Reflection for Leadership Development 50199

This is your final reflection and blog for the course overall. 

It is an extensive reflection on your course experience, with detailed reference to the specific weekly chapters and experiences and what you learned about yourself and others during this time.  Discuss the impact of this learning on your life and future. What specifically has helped.

You should reflect on your specific leadership moments of revelation.  You can use all the personal reflection blogs that have been done previously and perhaps remark on what has evolved in you, your new perspective, your new or renewed motivation and expectations.

MY RESPONSE

A Journey of self discovery and revelations…. Unto a paradigm of possibilities.

In the beginning and before my exposure to the Leadership course in this program, I have always thought leadership and management were one and exact same thing. Though as I grew along the experience, I began to see that leadership and management were different. Through this program, I have come to understand and to really draw an obvious line of difference between the two whether in scope, content, mechanics, orientation and outcomes.

I recalled in my early days of work life, when I was hired as an executive, and in the course of time while delivering on my duties, I was made to take on a higher role of managing the workforce. From that perspective, it was just management, but I had qualities that made the delivery on the task easy and effective. These qualities like motivating, listening (maybe not enough listening though) and being a team player. I brought these to bear on my new assignment to achieve success. These qualities, I have come to know through this leadership course are leadership qualities, things that help make a good leader.

I learnt through the experience that to lead, you must be a good follower. It also was very evident that people, when carried along and made to share and own a process, they give their very best. I was sincere with everyone on my dealings. There was a common goal in sight and we are were aligned to it.

With my sense of responsibility and integrity, we called on ourselves to a binding philosophy of walking the talk on our tasks and deliverable. Being a great team player with the ability to influence and inspire, it was easy to get everyone going because whatever task we had was a common purpose.

I also reckoned that I am a change agent who regularly desired a change in status quo, especially if something better can be done from the present situation.

Then was the personal assessment exercise with the Gallup Strength Finder Assessment. This has helped me to rediscover myself as the exercise reflected the inner me and brought to fore those strengths and qualities that I have before now taken for granted. The Gallup Strength Finder captures the essence of how I have carried on as a leader. From it, I found and discovered that I am a developer, who through the various engagements, see the potential in others. And that I seek to assist and work with them to bring out their best.

I also discovered that I am a learner, always seeking openings to new knowledge and understanding of things. Connectedness, I have always seen myself being a vital part or member of a larger group geared towards a common good. This has helped me to work, follow and lead in the many situations that I have found myself. I also learned of myself having the quality of intellection and positivity. On tasks and assignments, I see that I do a rigorous exercise of thinking through the things that I do, while remaining positive even in the face of the most difficult of things, times and situations.

The personal insight is helpful in developing my leadership potential as it gave me evidence of what my strengths were. Building on these strengths can only mean more success for me in my leadership endeavor.

From the assessment, I was able to discover my leadership credo. I now see myself as a Servant-Leader. I most often work with others even from the position of leadership to understand and support, while challenging them to be the best of all they can be. People need inspiration, people need a leader they can trust to challenge them to grow while working with them as one of them and not judging. The authentic leader.

Having to work with others in teams, I realized that it is very important to exhibit trust, integrity, sense of responsibility, commitment, and being authentic to be able to build and lead a team that will be in high performance.

During my team development experience, I called upon the strengths and qualities that I realized I have through the Gallup Strength Finder exercise which included, intellection, developer, learner and connectedness. I learnt from the experience, energized by every new discovery, while allowing the others to seek out what their strengths were.

Today, I have learnt through this program and the leadership course experience that the near conflict and obvious conflict situations basically were so because, I was not listening enough to others. I now know that going forward, I must listen more and to always encourage and call for feedback.

The problem-solving template is also something that is great in resolving and solving problems in teams. To me this is a great eye opener. This is a great tool for team cohesion and positioning for high performance.

Feedback, when very constructive, timely and specific is the best way to validate the learning process. I will constantly incorporate feedback at every point of milestone appraisals and achievements. I hope to work and develop the courage and courtesy to welcome feedback and implement them for the good of my team and my leadership drive.

The Leadership area that I am most naturally drawn to is Leadership Motivation. In my continuous engagement with others especially in teams, I have seen myself both in leading and following, able to drive success and cohesion through providing enabling environment that is safe and trusting. Everyone in the team feels important and appreciated.

I know I am drawn to the leadership motivation as most often I provide inspiration, this helps to drive success as a reward for hard work, I encourage team members to pursue things that will add value to them and ultimately to the group. I see people I have worked with in the past, step-up into doing the things they thought was without relevance, now they bask in the euphoria of their success and disposition.

I usually make sure that every of my team member feels a sense of belonging, everyone is offered opportunity for development to strive for goals. In the groups or teams, I strive to foster collaboration and inclusion. I seek to live the values I profess and hold dear. I show trust to other team members that they can contribute meaningfully to the general good of the team. I see myself as very good in moral suasion, getting things done through appealing to peoples’ inner self and conscience. Today, I have seen this to mean being collaborative.

The most important lesson I learnt generally about leadership from this program and course is that being in a leadership position offers opportunities to see things from a more enlightened perspective. The leader is the bearer of the team’s vision. Being a leader comes with enormous responsibilities and anyone in the position should be able to live up to the bill. The leader must be creative, a good follower, possess a high degree of motivation for team members and should be able to communicate effectively.

I have learnt from the experience that leaders are vision bearers for their teams or organisations. I learnt of the obvious qualities and attributes a leader must possess.

With this knowledge, I will endeavor to exhibit these qualities, including Leadership Communication, Leadership Motivation and being an Authentic Leader. A leader who is creative, futuristic and dynamic. I will apply myself to build a high-performance team by listening to my team and treating everyone with equity and fairness.

Knowing fully well that my attitude of integrity, honor, and sense of responsibility will dictate the tone and tempo of how I am able to drive my team to high performance, I will live by the values and standards of which I expect from team members. I have learnt that every member of the team should pull their weight, I have learnt to engage everyone from their areas of strength while acknowledging but not emphasizing areas of weakness.

I will endeavor to drive cohesion in the teams, unity of purpose is a vital ingredient of high performance. When in a team, we are a team—Together Everyone Achieves More— even as I will hold those not living up to their responsibility to account. This would be achieved through signing up to an actionable Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Here the Reinforcement Perspective on Motivation would be explored. When any member of a team I belong to struggles, we all struggle.

Reinforcement theory simply looks at the relationship between behavior and its consequences by changing or modifying followers’ on-the-job behavior through the appropriate use of immediate rewards or punishments. (Daft, 2014)

I will listen, lead and follow as an effective member of the team. I will try not to appear as the smartest person in the team. Being a leader does not mean knowing more than anyone else. I will recognize, encourage and promote others to excel. Give them the trust and autonomy to be creative and do excellent work, defined in their terms. I simply provide the direction, so that this excellent work contributes to a shared purpose.

Through the revelations, I can see that I have evolved to a new learning of what kind of a leader I desire to be and the strategies to be that going forward.

In the entire spectrum and dynamics of leadership, what has evolved in me is the fact that I am now on the path of being what I desire as an authentic leader. This leadership course has taken me through the motion and I have come to know and realize that it is possible. Leadership can be learnt. Through the various exercises and templates, I look forward to applying myself to the learning and for continuous improvement.

As not everyone that will engage with going forward had the opportunity at this time to go through this learning, I will endeavour to be and lead the change I desire by bringing to bear my new learning and insights. This motivates me.

My expectations going forward. There are still obvious gaps no matter how much I have learnt and grown. In every human endeavour there is always this yearning and irreconcilable gap between promise and performance. I will continue to strive to close this gap and be the leader I desire to be and most especially the leader that will impact others positively.

It is a journey into a lot of possibilities for growth in my leadership endeavour. I hope to get better at every turn and for every engagement.

[estimize]

Revenge of the Humans Part II: A New Blueprint For Discretionary Management

“If investing is entertaining, if you're having fun, you're probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.” - George Soros

In early May I published a thought piece titled, “Revenge of the Humans: How Discretionary Managers Can Crush Systematics”. It was the culmination of my thinking over the past few years regarding the seismic shift taking place in the asset management industry towards quantitative processes, and what’s next for all of us.

To be honest, the response to the piece was surprising given what I felt was a pretty high level overview. It was widely disseminated through the industry, and republished all over the place. Maybe when you’re so deeply embedded in something it’s hard to see where the rest of the industry stands on the learning curve. Or maybe it just struck a cord and put a bunch of things together in a coherent way that made sense for people.

The piece was published a few weeks before the Estimize L2Q (Learn 2 Quant) Conference held on June 20th. The point of the conference being to teach discretionary managers the 101 class for the quantitative research process, using factor models, being factor aware, and working with new unique data sets. I want to thank the few hundred attendees, especially the Jefferies and Worldquant teams who sponsored, taught sections of the day, and invited their clients to what was a standing room only affair.

After the conference I spent some time talking to the attendees, especially the discretionary PMs who made up most of the list, and the quants at their firms attempting to help them make this shift. I wasn’t surprised to hear their largest piece of feedback given the nature of the Q&A sessions during the event. While they found the rest of the day useful and interesting, what really struck a cord was the discussion of how discretionary firms will actually make this shift, how they will structure their teams, how they’ll design their workflows and stock selection processes, and how they’ll overcome the egotistical issues associated with taking decision making power away from the PM and distributing it more widely. Frankly, we only touched on these things in cursory way, yet it was the thing that struck the biggest cord.

For that reason, I wanted to take the time to follow up on the first piece with a second, a deeper dive into how I see the best ways to structure this process having met with hundreds of firms over the last few years to bring them onto the Estimize platform. We’ve seen what’s out there, what’s working, and what’s not.

AlphaGo and the Human

While the recent string of articles (some very poorly researched and written, some dead on point) by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and FT will have you believe Skynet is going to exterminate every last human from investing, those pieces are obviously hyperbolic and far from the truth. Two things are very important to remember. First, even systematic quantitative trading begins with humans doing research and making ex-ante assumptions regarding an economic rationale for why one thing should lead to another (when a company beats its consensus estimate by a lot, the stock goes up?). Yes, it’s possible that true artificial intelligence might make a dent in this at some point, but don’t hold your breath. Until then, humans need to make creative thoughtful decisions about why two things might be correlated in some way. And two, we already have quite a bit of evidence that humans with access to intelligent machines can consistently beat machines.

The best example of this is the recent performance of Google’s AlphaGo model which ran the table on the best Go player in the world relatively easily. But when the AlphaGo system was given to a mediocre Go player, that player was able to consistently beat the AlphaGo model on its own. Why? Because humans are incredibly intelligent and astute at picking up on data that doesn’t fit. Even the most nonlinear intelligent AI models we have today are still based mostly on pattern matching, not necessarily building mental models of things, which is the basis of true intelligence. When something is slightly out of whack, we’re pretty good at sensing it. It’s based in our evolutionary biology stemming from needing to avoid being eaten on the African Savanna or track a wild animal over the course of many days. Of course, the advantage of the AlphaGo system, or any quantitative model for that matter, is that it never oversleeps and gets eaten by the lion. Algos don’t get too drunk the night before, they don’t go through a divorce, and they don’t suffer from the heuristics and biases that are hardcoded into us from birth that we must overcome to operate well in markets.

In our specific industry, this translates into a very important distinction between fully systematic models and the human/algo hybrid. Even the best most sophisticated quantitative systematic funds can not significantly overweight positions in their book based on a very specific understanding of the minutia of what drives a specific stock in a specific industry. It’s simply too much work to do that across 1,000 names, or 3,000 names. You can’t have models for a zillion different variables, we know intuitively you’re likely to come out with nothing good in that situation versus having a dozen variables that work, but only work ok across all 1,000 names. And for them that’s fine, because diversification pays. But it means they hit for singles only, all day.

Discretionary managers can do better though. They can do the deep dive into the quantitative research to find the variables that matter for their specific 50 names, and build the models that sit beside the human to guide decision making 97% of the time. And it’s that other 3% where humans can decide to size up when they’ve “seen this pitch” 1,000 other times, it’s a hanging curveball, and it’s time to swing for the fences.

There Are No Shortcuts

While the majority of discretionary firms have woken up to the existential issue they face, almost every single one of them is going about solving the problem in the wrong way. In essence, they are either naive of or unwilling to tackle the true issue at the root of their performance, and have attempted to take a shortcut which will not solve anything. The core problem is not getting access to unique data sources, it’s not figuring out how to build a “data science” team, it’s not figuring out how to build a “data lake”. These are necessary but not sufficient steps to solving the problem. The true problem is more deeply embedded in the culture of the discretionary firms, it is a uniquely human problem. The real problem that firms must solve before they tackle those above, is how to structure their teams and the investment process itself to be more quantitative and systematic.

In fact, solving those other problems before solving the real one will only make things worse. When performance doesn’t improve because PMs are not listening to the output of those processes, what do you think everyone is going to say when reviewing resource allocation? The “quant and data stuff” is going to be the first thing thrown under the bus as adding no value. And after being burned firms will take two steps back after attempting that first step forward. This isn’t a thing that you just bolt onto your firm by hiring a few quants or a data science team. This isn’t a thing that you can just purchase your way to success in. God knows there are big firms out there that have built big teams and bought a lot of data only to have the firm at large claim it all useless. That happens because no one did the really hard work to rethink the core investment process from the ground up, including these things from the beginning.

I say this to the detriment of my own ability to quickly sell more Estimize data to these discretionary firms which certainly could benefit from it. But I’ve seen what happens when firms that don’t have a process to use things buy them, it doesn’t work out well for either party in the end. I’m involved in no less than a dozen deals right now where the quant who was hired by a discretionary firm to review new data sources is banging his head against the wall trying to figure out how to incorporate any of the stuff he looks at into the PMs decision making. It’s not just our stuff, it’s everyone else’s as well. Eventually these guys are going to get fed up and leave their firms. What quant wants to deal with interpersonal, social, and process issues all day to have any of their work mean anything?

Tear It Down To The Studs

A few weeks ago I was sitting in the conference room of a $20B asset manager who wanted to hear more about the Estimize data set and how they might use it. I normally start these meetings asking them to explain how their investment process takes place, who makes decisions, and on what timeframes. The senior management went on to explain that they had 17 analysts across four main sectors. Four PMs shared the analysts. Their books consist of 60-70 names at any given time and they are shooting for holding periods of 1-2 years on the long side (believe me this never actually happens but all firms like to tell you they are longer term investors, frankly I don’t understand why, because it sounds good?). When I asked them how stock selection took place, they all kind of looked at each other like no one wanted to answer the question (there was a PM sitting in the room). The basic answer that the CIO eventually managed to produce like Sylvester coughing up Tweety Bird was that it was at the analyst’s discretion to bring ideas to the PM and at the PMs discretion to use them…or not. And of course, the analyst’s calls were based on their “unique understanding” of each stock, whatever that means. I asked if they measured the efficacy of the analysts’ historical picks. No. I asked if they measured the accuracy of the analysts’ fundamental estimates. No.

At this point everyone around the table got it and they began asking me questions about the percentage of firms I had met with that were attempting the transformation at different levels. I remarked that I wasn’t there to tell them how to structure their investment process, it wasn’t my place to do that. They looked at me and said half jokingly, “maybe you should”. It was slightly awkward. You could see their faces, they had brought me in to talk to them about how they might be able to leverage our specific data set because their “alternative data committee” had been tasked with that, but they were realizing that the more they dug into this the more it was going to reveal the real issues they faced.

While these guys should get a lot of credit for being openly introspective, the amount of ego damage that’s going to take place for some very rich people in order to make this shift is going to be massive. To my surprise, the guys in that room (no women?) were sober about it and seemed to accept the conclusions they themselves had drawn about the situation they are in. But they certainly understood how difficult it would be to make this shift from the perspective of institutional inertia. It is not enough for executives to want something to happen in our industry, the PMs who truly wield the power must be on board as well, and this is a threat not only to their ego, but if done correctly, their position within the firm.

Here’s What Needs To Happen

Let’s transition away from the problem now, which everyone should be sober about the difficulty of solving, and talk about some solutions. I will preface all of this with the fact that what I’m about to propose has not ever been fully implemented. Some funds I’ve met with have pieces of this process, other funds have other pieces. Most in-house software built to support pieces of this process is super shitty. That’s what you get when financial people build software, they forsake user experience and then no one uses it. I would sincerely advise firms to bend away from attempting to build software meant for use by non quantitative individuals. For far fewer dollars I guarantee you can find a fintech company or startup that is willing to work with you to build the feature set you’re looking for, and they will have a far greater incentive to see that it works. And if you believe that your edge will be in building this glorious piece of software that no other fund has, well, good luck with that.

Core beliefs and universe

Developing differentiated forward looking views

Structuring the unstructured

Developing factor models

Measurement of historical accuracy

List review and debate

Stock selection, position sizing and marketing timing

Organizational Structure

The Software

Core Beliefs and Universe

I ask some funds what their investment philosophy is and many can’t answer that simple question. All teams need to know what their north star is. What are the variables, timeframes, market caps and sectors that you believe your team has an advantage in analyzing better than everyone else? Almost all funds lie about turnover and how often they trade, or why they trade. Frankly I find it interesting how poor most firms are at elucidating this set of constraints given that LPs like to bucket their investment in funds this way and look at the exposure to these variables. Any fund looking to market well should have a good grasp on this.

The important aspect of seriously sitting down to lay out your focus here is that many of the next steps are dependent on your bent here. Many firms will figure out they don’t have the right people to execute the strategy they actually want to run. The same type of people who will successfully run a momentum book will fail miserably at picking value stocks. It’s a completely different set of emotional and cognitive abilities. There’s no such thing as a “generalist”, when someone tells me they are a generalist I think, oh that’s awesome, this must have been the first job you were offered.

Let’s say that we’re building a fund in which our investment universe is tech and consumer names above $300M market cap. We’re a long/short shop and our target investment horizon is one year (more on this later). We believe in growth and momentum so we’re focused on names that are growing top line numbers quickly and show relative strength vs their peers and the market.

Developing Differentiated Forward Looking Views

At its most basic level, fundamental investing is a very simple algorithm. Stock XYZ (which is part of your universe) currently trades at 5X trailing 12 month revenue. Revenue is the variable most causally related and correlated to the trailing one year performance of the stock. Your expectation for forward 12 month revenue is $1B. You believe that if the company hits that mark the multiple will go from 5X trailing to 6X trailing (for various reasons). This would give the company a $6B valuation. The “market’s consensus” (more on that later) is for the company to earn $900M. The market’s expected price is $4.5B ($900M * 5). Your alpha is the difference in the valuation the market expects and what you expect, you can either be right about the revenue, the multiple, or both.

In order to generate real alpha, you must have differentiated views from the market consensus, otherwise you’re just playing with beta. And as I outlined in the previous piece, it’s very obvious that the number of LPs willing to invest in managers that are simply leveraging beta exposure are dwindling.

In today’s world analysts at hedge funds and asset management firms do obviously make estimates and have price targets. But there are a few huge issues around that.

First off, they almost exclusively reside within disparate Excel models. Excel is a great tool for modeling, but it’s a really bad tool for running processes. Yes macros exist, but in my humble opinion anything being run via a macro in Excel should probably be a piece of software externally. It’s not that hard to get data out of Excel. These estimates should be collected centrally so that they can be processed centrally. There are a small handful of firms doing this, none well. I’ve seen the software, it sucks and the analysts hate it.

Second, analysts don’t update their models at very regular intervals. It’s normally an ad-hoc process, which severely limits how useful the models are.

Third, because there’s no central repository, there’s no ex-post analysis of the results of those estimates and certainly no good Moneyball being played by looping the learnings back into the investment decision process.

Fourth, analysts only tend to share the models with the PMs for stock selection when they feel, for whatever reason, it’s warranted. The entire idea that analysts should be “pitching” ideas to PMs HAS TO END. Just think for a second how many crazy heuristics and outside variables are associated with this being how ideas bubble up to the person who puts things in the book. While the analyst is doing really good work to analyze a few dozen or more companies, has models, has estimates, maybe has a really good feel for supply/demand for the stock, and other variables, he could decide not to take an outlier view that he thinks is a winner to the PM because he had a fight with his wife this morning and doesn’t feel like getting into another difficult argument again today. Maybe the last few ideas he brought the PM didn’t go well and so he wants to play it safe with the next one. Maybe he’s been bringing all his ideas to the PM but the PM doesn’t listen to him and now he’s pissed so he’s gonna keep a personal record of them but not give the good ones to the PM because he hates his boss and wants to change firms. I’ve seen it all! The fights between analysts to get their ideas into the book, the back stabbing, the bro-ing out with your PM to become better friends. Who thought any of this was a good idea?!

Fifth, no one is measuring the efficacy of any of the estimates being made and it’s rare that the performance of the analyst is tracked to any meaningful degree. And if it is, it’s rarely, if ever, used to inform future decisions. We’re dealing with very structured data here that we can measure extremely easily at regular intervals. There is no reason we should be measuring analysts subjectively in dumb ways like how well they get along with the PM. This isn’t a hockey team, chemistry isn’t necessary, it’s about having a differentiated view and being correct. Yes you need to be able to talk through how you got there and your confidence intervals, but man, that should be tertiary at best in terms of the totem poll of analyst skill sets. Give me Michael Burry over the hedge fund bro who can talk your ear off any day.

“But if we don’t have a long history of someone’s track record, a small sample of their estimates won’t be statistically significant,” you say.  Yes, true, but you’re not dealing with one analyst, you’re dealing with a dozen at a decent sized fund, and we can quickly get to that level in aggregate, and then as track records build for individuals we can start to narrow down our selection.

How do analysts develop differentiated views? Amongst all of the other methods which I’m not going to get into here, it can and should include access to new unique data sources. As I said previously, firms are mostly doing this whole thing backwards. But once they get this process in place, this is where a lot of the company level data fits in. It should inform the analyst as to what their beliefs of the forward earnings, revenue, EBITDA, same store sales, monthly active users, ARPU, or whatever other variable is important to that company. And then it should also inform their views on the multiple. It is really at the analyst level that a lot of the company specific information should be used. But at the end of the day, it needs to be used to inform a structured estimate of future expectations and placed into the rest of the process for stock selection just like any other.

An analyst told me a story about his fund in which the data science team had gotten some good data that made them feel like Netflix's international subscriber additions that quarter was going to be well above what everyone was expecting. They themselves made a recommendation to buy the stock to the PM. The PM looked at it, and went the other way for whatever reason and shorted the stock. Netflix was up 20% the next day. The head of the firm then put it on the “no trade” list.

None of this is going to matter if you don’t have a process to use it in.

Here’s how our theoretical hedge fund is going to work to solve some of these issues. Analysts are going to be required to update their models and thus their estimates the day of/after each earnings release, as well as 45 days into each company’s fiscal quarter, and again three days before each company report. Analysts are required to make a full forward year of quarterly estimates for EPS, Revenue, and the 2-3 key performance indicators specific to their firm (same store sales, bookings, iPhones, etc.). Analysts will put an expected multiple on the aggregated full year of estimates they make to imply a price target. Let’s assume we have 10 analysts, each of them is going to cover 30 names, so we’ll have 300 to work with.

Structuring the Unstructured

Stock selection obviously is not just about structured forward looking estimates. There are a range of other variables that have to be taken into consideration, variables associated with risk factors that have to be accounted for, or catalysts that could affect the fundamentals or the multiple of the stock. Theoretically these unstructured variables should all play into either the fundamental expectation of the analyst or the multiple she puts on it, but realistically they won’t. So we need to capture them.

There are a few decent software tools for teams to capture this type of information and share it, and firms have done a much better job at this task than the structured estimate side. Factset acquired Code Red a little while back, Advent acquired Tamale from my friend John Fawcett who now runs the great Quantopian platform. The problem with both products is the nature of the input being vastly unstructured. Good luck getting anyone to systematically review the notes the analysts input. And if you think getting analysts to make structured estimates on regular time frames is difficult, try convincing them to put notes in there regularly. There are some firms now trying to run semantic analysis on their own internal research notes to structure the sentiment embedded in it, but I haven’t seen anyone doing this effectively or getting anything out of it.

There’s a better way to do this. Analysts need to pick the 10 or so unstructured variables that they believe will affect the stock performance on a regular basis and give structured sentiment for them. I’m talking about stuff like management quality, probability of getting acquired, disruption risk, etc. (each company will share some variables with the others and have their own unique drivers). The key here is to turn those research notes into data by asking the analyst to rate each variable on a 1-10 scale or give a binary yes/no. There are two uses for this. One, when we get to the latter part of the stock selection process where the PM gets involved, it’s so much easier for her to look at structured variables than a whole lot of words. Two, we can see the historical change in an analyst’s sentiment for these variables and ask them questions about that change, and we can run correlation between these variables and stock performance, or between these variables and the estimates.

We’re simply trying to collect as much useful data at regular intervals as we can, because machines are really good at using data, they aren’t so great at dealing with a bunch of words entered at random intervals.

Our analysts are going to fill out these unstructured surveys at the same interval they make their estimates, or at any point in time between.

Developing Factor Models

In a minute we’re going to discuss how our analysts’ forward looking estimates are going to be the backbone of our stock selection process. But before we get to that, I want to talk a little bit about the other piece of the puzzle which we will later merge with the former.

Up until now, quants really haven’t played a role at all in our process. Quants aren’t really the people who are going to help our analysts get a hold of unique data sets that help them make better estimates, that really falls into the realm of data engineers and data analysts (more on that later). But we’re now going to pull them into developing factor models which will help us with both our stock selection and risk management (market timing, position sizing, etc.).

A factor model, for those not initiated, is basically a Z score of some variable across the stocks in your universe. Some factors can represent betas (value, momentum, growth) and some can be true alphas like the ones we provide to clients at Estimize (post earnings drift, pre earnings consensus trend, historical surprise). Our goal in this part of the process is to develop alpha generating factor models, at the very end of this I’ll talk briefly about portfolio construction and how to limit factor exposure to betas.

Alpha generating factor models are developed by quants using the scientific method. We start with a hypothesis, usually focus on a specific data set, for why variable A would be causally related and correlated to the outcome in the price of a set of stocks. For example, maybe we believe that the tone of the words the CEO uses on the earnings call is associated with six month stock performance. Either we’ve developed the tools internally to perform this analysis, or a 3rd party has and can deliver us an output our quants can leverage. In either case, our goal is to basically rank the sentiment from the calls from best to worst. We turn that into a numeric score for each company indexed between -100 and +100. Once we have our score we take the first half of the time series of our factor score data set and look at the correlation between scores and stock movement. If there is a positive relationship and the top decile of scores significantly outperform the bottom decile of scores, we’ve completed step one. Then we take the second half of our time series and run the same analysis. We then analyze how similar the results were between the first half (in sample) and the second half (out of sample). If they are similar we can be confident that we have a model that will inform us well in the future.

Warning: the above paragraph is probably the quickest dirtiest review of quant research and factor models ever written, but it should get the basic point across.

We’re not just going to develop one factor model, we’re going to build a whole set of them. And each company may have different interesting data sets that gain us insight into how stocks will perform relative to one another. We’re basically attempting to algorithmically rank our universe from best to worst on a range of different factors.

Quants are going to play a big role in this process, but so will the data analyst who works with the fundamental analysts to understand their hypotheses for what data might drive their names. You can not do the quant research without the data analyst or the fundamental analysts, this is a team effort due to the nature of having to have an economic rationale for why a variable is causally related to under/over performance amongst their names.

The quant research pipeline is a tricky one. There are always limited resources and data companies calling in left and right to get you to test their data set. Data analysts need to be attending conferences and talking to new data vendors constantly, while working with the analysts and PM to figure out what variables might make the most sense for their names. A simple weekly meeting where the data analyst, PM, and analysts all come with a forcerank of the data sets on the board for testing in the future makes sense. Results from ongoing testing will also be shared at this meeting. The PM should ultimately be the one who sets the schedule for future testing, not because they are the most knowledgeable, but because it will engender a sense of ownership over the process and the outcome that the PM needs to take, this will become more clear why later.

Measurement of Historical Accuracy

While having all this structured data from our analysts is great, it only gets us so far if we don’t measure and use it for a few different purposes.

It’s not that hard to run basic statistics on how accurate our analysts are. We want to know which stocks they are best at estimating, whether they were correct because of their fundamental estimates or their multiple estimates. When are they most correct, when they are super aggressive or when they are more conservative? Obviously the larger the delta to consensus the greater chance they are going to be wrong, so we need to understand their weighted score.

As I said above, we’re trying to play Moneyball here. We’re looking for the analyst predictions with the greatest delta (opportunity) which we have confidence in.

We can also look at the unstructured variables for which we had the analysts give us their ratings. Were they able to predict names that would be taken out or management that would get caught committing fraud? Only one way to know, measure! This can all be done easily with software.

Being able to measure all of this should not only inform which analysts you trust, but who should be compensated more/less, or fired. Let’s not pretend our industry is based on love and kindness, analysts are mercenaries who should gravitate towards the firms that treat them the best (comp, resources, environment, etc.). If I was a great analyst, I’d want to work in a truly meritocratic environment where I didn’t have to play politics with my PM, I’d just do my job as a great analyst and have the track record to prove it if they don’t ultimately listen to me.

This is also going to have an impact on who firms hire, namely, women. I’m no culture warrior, but guys, you are destroying your chance at building your firms by continuing to lock an entire gender out of your firms because of the cultural issue. Women are more analytical, less prone to irrational bets, and frankly, in my experience, they cause less issues in the workplace because they have less ego. There are academic papers that back up the fact that female PMs are simply better at their jobs.

List Review and Debate

So let’s bring this all together now. We have our universe and investment philosophy. We have our analysts’ expectations. And we have our factor models. Now comes the hard part where all the egos come out to play.

The software that sits at the center of this process is going to produce an analysis of where our analysts’ implied price targets differ from the market consensus, and the confidence interval the system has in those differentiated expectations being correct. All of our names are going to be sorted top to bottom, both on the long and the short side, by the delta in those expectations so that we can run down the list at a regular interval. On this screen we’ll be able to dig into all of the underlying statistics about our analysts’ expectations, their historical accuracy and all of the unstructured attributes they’ve given 1-10 scores for.

Theoretically, this list should be the basis for the PMs stock selection model. These are her analysts’ best ideas. It is now her job to dig further in. In the case of our fictional fund, the PM should be reviewing this list every day since changes in expectations due to recent earnings reports can and should significantly change future expectations from our analysts and affect which names are long and short targets. For longer term funds this process might be weekly or even monthly or quarterly.

The PM then needs to go back to each analyst and ask questions. Dig deeper into their thesis. Bring up issues and have debates about their underlying assumptions. Why did they expect the multiple to increase? What was the catalyst for that? Do we really believe the market will see things the way we do? Why would you be wrong about growth going from 20% to 30% YoY? Could this short name get squeezed, or bought?

This is where the PM earns her job. Theoretically the alpha she creates is the difference between a portfolio simply rebalanced regularly to produce the top and bottom ideas vs the portfolio she actually holds due to weeding out names where her experience and intuition says to deviate from the model. We can directly measure this. It’s not the analyst’s job to fight for their position to be in the book, it’s the PMs job to weed it out. I hope you appreciate the difference between those two things and why it makes such a huge impact.

In the case of our fictional fund, the PM will review this list daily and have conversations with analysts as needed. Because our universe is 300 names, our book is going to be roughly 40 names, and we’re going to run it beta neutral.

Stock Selection and Portfolio Review

While the PM may review the list daily, that doesn’t mean they’ll be trading daily and it doesn’t mean whatever is at the top and bottom will get into the book. This is where we now weave in the factor models we built earlier.

Our software will place the -100 to +100 factor model scores for each of our factors next to the stocks in very simple color coded boxes and then give an overall factor score. The idea here is that we want to match the fully quantitative view with our analysts’ predictions and see where both line up. There may be cases where our analysts believe in the fundamental thesis, but our factor models simply say that it’s not the right time, so we’ll pass.

This really gets useful when the factor model scores line up with our analysts’ assumptions. This is where discretionary firms employing this process can size up, and hit home runs. This is why discretionary managers can beat the systematic quants, because they can take bigger swings when a fat pitch comes right down the center of the plate.

PMs need to be able to put their egos away here and listen to what the factor models are saying. Don’t try and bet against the Moneyball system, more often than not you’re going to lose.

Some of these factor scores are going to be stock selection based (history surprise, relative strength, etc.) but some of them will be more timing based and shorter term like a few of the factor models we’ve built at Estimize around pre earnings, through earnings, and post earnings drift. These models are helpful for risk management and position sizing around earnings and can help you collect alpha in the few weeks around each report. It can also keep you out of holding a name through a report where the odds are poor and a negative move is expected. We can use these and other timing models to manage risk better and limit the amount of names that blow up on us.

Our goal is to bat around 50%, but slug 600, and limit our losses on the downside by admitting when we’re wrong and exiting trades. There’s nothing that says we can’t re-enter them later if the fundamental outlook still holds. But if multiples move opposite our thesis, we need to reevaluate why we were wrong about that side of the estimate.

The names in our book need to be evaluated regularly as well. Do they still fall at the top of the list? Do our factor models still favor them? Just because our target timeframe for our trades is a year does not mean that we need to hold names that long or that we can’t hold them longer. It means that we’re basing our book on assumptions made about stock prices a year out.

In terms of position sizing and portfolio construction, it’s very important that we’re aware of what betas we’re exposed to and attempt to limit that exposure. Software like OmegaPoint does a good job at helping to optimize position sizing and portfolio construction for this purpose. Many firms have no clue that they are generating real alpha, but producing negative returns because they are exposed to the wrong betas at the wrong times. A great example of this being that Tesla and Microsoft have both done well recently. But simply being long both did not generate you the same amount of alpha. Most of Microsoft’s move can be explained by a few betas, but Tesla’s move was not, it was independent of the market so to speak, it was true alpha. We’re looking for true alpha, or at least to very selectively leverage beta at opportune times. Betas like momentum and value tend to oscillate in terms of performance, and we would be smart to pay attention to when we should limit our exposure to these in relation to sizable positive moves in our P&L.

Organizational Structure

One of the biggest problems today is that while some firms are begrudgingly trying to make the switch over to being more quantitative, they have not altered their organizational structures at all. The quant or data science teams they’ve hired sit almost entirely outside the process itself. CIOs have no clue where to put these people, and they didn’t want to tell the PM to deal with them, so they just stuck them in another room. Huge $200B asset management firms have hired a bunch of quants, usually in the risk management department, to do research, simply to say they have quants working there. Even the senior most quants and heads of data science have zero power to implement anything, because the PMs who run each book are still in charge. And these firms rarely want to build out fully systematic books because that’s not where the AUM is, they don’t really have nor do they want products set up for that.

I want to walk through the different types of people in the front and middle office and how firms should think about hiring these people and giving them authority. But most of all, how CIOs should think about demanding cooperation amongst them.

Fundamental Analyst - Gone are the days of simply hiring the kid coming out of her second year of investment banking work at Goldman. That’s fine if you just want your analysts to build models and run numbers but it’s useless if you need them to have an informed and differentiated view on an industry. Analysts are actually going to be older, most likely mid 30s or greater and have experience working within the industry they cover. If you’re gonna make estimates for the future of semiconductors you better have worked in that industry prior because technologies move quickly and there are both hugely cyclical and secular trends taking place at the same time. My enterprise tech analyst better come from a silicon valley startup background, someone who has relationships in that world where companies like IBM are getting disrupted faster than ever by startups that can scale extremely quickly. There is massive opportunity in those relationships and knowing the competitive landscape first hand. Analysts do not need to possess technical quantitative knowledge, but have to be open to using new unique data sources as inputs to their estimates and sentiment about the multiple. Overall though, I want smart people with deep industry experience willing to make bold calls.

Trader - More and more traders are becoming less relevant as algos take over, but those who are left are going to be far more quantitative than they were before.

Data Engineer - Engineering is an important part of leveraging data and having someone dedicated to working with data feeds is important. A quantitative background is great but not necessary, I would rather have someone who works quickly and accurately more than anything else. This is a data wrangling job. Matching things up, cleaning it up, dealing with vendor sales engineers.

Quantitative Engineer - These are the real expensive engineers, the ones who have to turn the quant models into code (the factor model). They need quant backgrounds but also very strong engineering skills. They are usually the lower level Phd students, but not the really awesome ones doing astrophysics.

Quantitative Researcher - This is your pure quant, the one doing the research into new factor models and looking at the efficacy of new data sets as an indicator of future fundamental performance of a company. You can grab them out of Chicago Booth and other academic institutions.

Data Analyst - Ah the data analyst, the rare bird. This is a hard role to fill and one that many firms have stupidly skipped over. This is the person who works between the analysts/PM and the quant/quant engineer/data engineer. This person needs technical knowledge, but also the ability to dive into the analysts’ models and see what data they need that can help them. This person is going to be at a lot of conferences looking for new data sets and even working with the data engineer to quickly take a look at new things. Interpersonal skills are a high priority here. It’s a hard mix of skills to find in one person, which is why I’ve seen firms pay so much money for these people. It’s a difficult role.

Portfolio Manager - Of all the roles this is where I think things really need to change in terms of who sits in this seat. It can no longer be hedge fund bros, they simply won’t survive here. Nor will the pure gunslingers and tape readers, gone. And you certainly don’t want the pure quants sitting in this seat. PMs of the future are going to be far more interpersonal and process driven. And this person does not need to be the smartest person on the desk, in fact I think that’s probably a detriment to the success of the team if she is. This is a cross functional role, and one that needs to be based on the behavioral attributes of the person more than anything else. An MBA may be useful here, but I would even say that having experience working at the early stages of a startup as a CEO can add a lot. I’m waiting for someone to develop a firm to leverage psychometric testing for different investment strategies so that we can identify people tuned for momentum vs value. You’re talking about a completely different psychology between those two people and it’s imperative you choose the person correctly. The PM needs to be able to keep the pace like a conductor and have the general knowledge about the sectors they are trading to go deep with the analysts. PMs should have some training in statistical and quantitative methods in order for them to talk intelligently with the quants and trust the factor models. Without that trust there’s simply no point in having them and you’ll only gain that by understanding how they are built. Should a PM know how to code, no. Should they understand what the code does and why, absolutely. Basic data science classes can provide this knowledge. Quantitative research methods 101 in college is a requirement.

I believe that compensation structures for the PM need to change. This is no longer “his book”. He is another player on the team, who has a specific role, to coordinate the dance. But in many ways he will have less impact on the alpha generated by the book than the analysts or the quants who create the factor models. The PM is now the offensive coordination calling the plays, not the quarterback on the field scrambling around and throwing touchdowns. We can now compensate analysts accurately for the efficacy of their calls, and the PM for how much alpha she adds above them. The rest of the team should be bonused out based on the performance of the book.

At pod based firms, the PM, trader, analyst, data analyst, quant and quant engineer are going to be members of the individual pod. Outside each pod will sit a centralized data infrastructure group made up of the firm’s CTO, a central data analyst, and centralized data engineers. Do not place true quants in this group because they will have little to no impact on anything used by the PMs if they are not part of their actual group.

The Software

I’ve talked a lot about this software that will sit at the center of this process. As I said before, firms should not attempt to build it, they will fail.

For the past 6 years I’ve been building a company called Estimize that does much of the first part of the process, collect and analyze the forward looking fundamental assumptions of the analysts. Over 55,000 people now contribute their estimates to our platform, including a broad swath of the buy side, making it the largest estimates data set in the world. It produces consensus estimates that are more accurate than Thomson Reuters or Bloomberg 70% of the time and 15% more accurate to the company’s print. Crowdsourcing works, plain and simple. Quant and discretionary firms purchase our data feeds, and some effectively use them to generate alpha.

The next step we are about to take, and this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, is to add the multiple expectation in order to derive a price target at those discrete intervals. This will give us the market’s consensus multiple, and this expectation for the stock price.

We are now beginning to partner with discretionary firms looking to implement this type of process to provide them with the internal dashboard which will do what I’ve outlined above. This is the next 3 years of my firm, working with funds to solve this process issue and become more quantitative in their decision making. I believe good software can produce positive behavioral results, as we have seen already with the pure fundamental estimates we provide to the market.

I’m excited to be a part of this massive shift in our industry and sincerely believe we can help build better firms that will be successful in competing for both capital and alpha against the systematic quants. My team and I are always here to chat about how you can effectively make that shift.

[jedi-princess-rey-blog]

The way to Type Your very own Music Band

Every aspiring musician dreams of joining a band. You can join an currently current band or type your personal. In case you join a band, you'll be performing promptly, but as a new entrant, can be accorded a minor part in concerts. At times joining a band, as an alternative to being your great musical dream, could just be synonymous to tagging in addition to the rest of the members. Nonetheless, joining an current band also has numerous positive aspects: The name and reputation in the band is currently established You train below pros and hone your talent The practical experience is invaluable You may, with time be elevated for the position of most important singer/guitarist But maybe you'd like to possess your own band to sing or play the guitar/drums to your heart's content? Initially of all you may have to produce up your thoughts no matter whether you would like to type a band that incorporates your friends with whom you'd execute periodically in clubs and social gatherings - an arrangement in which you might have loads of enjoyable, or whether or not you'd play as well as pros such that you just could rake in some moolah too. Naturally, the ideal aspect of building a band could be your important role in it. You determine what to play/sing and also you remain properly inside the limelight. The challenging aspect is waiting for your band to acquire the recognition and recognition for becoming a successful venture. To produce this success probable, there is lots you have got to program and execute. It usually helps to have a clear and comprehensive idea about what you've got to accomplish. Let's break up your band-creating endeavor into some achievable phases of action. The Objective: 1st of all visualize where you'll go, a year from now,..two years... 5 years from now. Inside this framework (and using a reasonable allowance for contingencies) break up the contribution of each and every performer you strategy to induct in to the band. Also, think of what kind of music you'd prefer to perform Jingles for commercials Background music for shows Videos Personal computer games Background score for motion pictures Live shows Acquiring your band members: Subsequent, who's going to become in your band? Let's list the the possibilities. Your friends The local music teacher - ask him about his students who are keen to play in a band Advertising inside the local paper for the sort of musician you need (keyboard player, vocalist, percussionist, , etc) Placing an ad in the papers, requesting applicants to send a recording in conjunction with their facts maintain in touch with other musicians you meet at rock shows or comparable performances; method them to find the appropriate men and women for the band Putting a related ad on the web Turn into a member in on line musical forums, participate in discussions and post your request Interview the candidates, just as you were appointing them for any job. Ask each of the essential inquiries, about their ambition, playing capacity, the probability of moving away from your city, why they wish to join a band, etc The answers will indicate which from the applicants are committed to trigger of your band. Choose them prudently Don't compromise around the excellent you anticipate in the applicants Somewhere involving visualizing the band and locating its members, try and come across a nice name for your band. The name should convey your uniqueness and appeal for the public for its sheer ingenuity. Writing songs: Writing songs and composing music is definitely an ongoing process. You could possibly have began writing the song long back, or possibly one of your band members can be a gifted writer. For developing attractive songs you have got to Study extensively to get ideas for lyrics Keep writing and writing, until you hit around the suitable words Keep a Thesaurus beside you to get a greater source for words Get a rhyming book to help you locate by far the most apt words Listen to numerous CDs that will help you identify the general style on the song Attend as a lot of musical shows to get a feel of what is well-liked However, limit the use of the these tools only to have you began; what you lastly generate have to be Fresh Original Sincere and Attractive Gear: Program and obtain the equipment as per your spending budget and requirement. Resort to desirable Specific Effects or your music performances. Create down your program of overall performance and practice schedule; be certain all members from the band have a copy of this. That way every single of you could possibly come prepared for every practice session. Copywriting: As soon as the song is ready, apply for its copyright, if you program to use it inside a functionality. Copyright provides you the sole right over the song. You have got to register the song together with the United states Copyright Office. In case you have extra than one song to copyright, solicit the assistance of a lawyer, who can help you get on together with the perform. The application form is downloadable from Your music is heard: The song is written, the musicians are prepared, and you have practiced your routine by way of and by way of. Only the efficiency is but to take place. That is how you get to become heard. Place a requisition for a slot inside the radio station in the local band hour Give away superior high quality recordings of one's functionality towards the local music dealer, radio stations, producers of shows, and so forth; You can even request the music dealer to play your CD in his shop and revert back to him to get the feedback - Did his clients just like the music? did they enquire about it? and so on Hook up with a charitable organization, and play for their unique occasions; this way your band gets recognized Method nearby clubs to allow you to carry out on their premises

Hand more than copies of the music to neighborhood DJs, RJs to play on their shows Play within the neighborhood park to create an awareness about your band Although you might be busy with all these popularization endeavors, keep in mind that you can't compromise the quality of music. You have to keep on practicing, making a lot more songs, and endeavor to reach higher levels of perfection. Practice and perseverance cause perfection that should bring in much more invites for your band. Get to know extra about Those Who Dream Band

[allroundermag-blog]

Daniel Conn - F45 Global Athletic Director

Hell of a lot of new fitness classes popping up around London these days, most of them with some strange name that offer absolutely no explanation as to what they actually are. So how do you know if it’s worth actually trying them out? Well, luckily for you, we’re here to help explain. You know, we’re kind of nice like that.

So what is F45? Well, it’s a series of fitness classes originating from Australia – apparently its pretty popular over there with people like Nicole Kidman and Ricky Martin (yes, Ricky Martin!) all giving it a go at one time or another. Over the past couple of years it’s made its way across the sea to loads of other countries, with a whole heap of them popping up in London.

Sure, the name may sound like a fighter jet, but it actually stands for functional training (as in the exercises you do) and 45 minutes, which is the standard time for a class. Nice and easy, once you’ve taken the time to look into it.

We’ve done a couple of classes before and we’re not lying when we say it’s tough. But tough is good when you’re trying to get results. Ruddy well planned as well. The kind of class where it goes by pretty quickly. Which is kind of what you need when you’re covered in sweat, screaming at the damn battleropes in your hands that won’t move any more.

But instead of listening to us moan about the fact we probably need to do a bit more exercise, we decided to speak to the Global Athletic Director for F45, Dan Conn and find out what makes it so good.

In a city where new gyms and boutiques seem to be opening every week, what makes F45 different?

We have a unique concept that we pride ourselves on not being intimidating for any attendee, while also being the most effective, engaging, results-based form of team training in the world. We have an innovative and motivating training formula, which focusses on the fact that we never repeat a workout. We like to create a social atmosphere, encouraging members to meet new friends, have fun and keep things as simple as possible. Workouts, including form and rotations, are displayed and ready to go when you arrive – just turn up and the amazing trainers are there to motivate and get you through it!

How does F45 cater for people of different abilities?

We have both progression (advanced) and regression (beginner) on all of the 5000+ exercises in our data base. We can make things easier or harder for both first timers and athletes, allowing them to train side-by-side and still have an amazing workout.

Can you sum up F45 in one sentence?

The world’s most innovative and motivating HIIT training with an electric, friendly team atmosphere.

What exercise are people most scared of in your workouts?

One of our main goals is to ensure that no one is intimidated or scared of any of our exercises. We’ve taken away the risk factor of heavy Olympic lifts, and our highly-trained coaches train our members to perform exercises that they may be familiar with, as well as new movements.

What in your eyes are the big things coming up in fitness over the next couple of years?

I strongly believe technology is at the forefront of the future of fitness.

Technology, and the digital era, has revolutionised the way we live and work, and is now making strong headway into the way we train. At F45, we use technology to enhance the member experience and make the rewards much more immediate. Multiple monitors strategically placed around the room help to guide the user through their workout, real-time heart rate monitoring gives immediate feedback on the client’s effort levels, and our smart phone app delivers a post-workout activity report, to name just a few benefits.

This year will see us incorporate more game play into the experience by allowing members to play off against each other, regardless of which F45 studio in the world they happen to be training. We see “gamification”, and the idea of friendly competition, becoming a major trend in fitness which is only in very early stages currently.

Where do you see F45 heading in the next five years?

There are no restrictions, we want to see them all over the world. In 3 years we’ve expanded into 25 countries around the world, including some you’d least likely expect. Next, we’re setting our sights on every state in America!

What’s your favourite workout track?

We have so many, but I love hip-hop on our resistance days. Lifting weights, teamed with some good beats, alongside friends is the best way to workout.

Have you met any famous people at F45, and were they any good at it?

Tonnes! From Hollywood actors to singers such as Benji Madden and Ricky Martin, famous athletes including Russell Wilson (quarterback for the Seattle Sea Hawks) and NBA players. I could name almost every sport and there would be a few top athletes who have done F45 to mix up their own training routines.

We also have huge social media profiles, with millions of followers and are considered the elite in their fields, which like to attend an F45 session – it’s actually a regular occurrence! Even the super stars like to have fun training.

For more information on F45, and to book a class, head over to the website here.

Picture Credits: F45

Daniel Conn – F45 Global Athletic Director was originally published on The Allrounder

[symbianosgames]

Howard Tsao is the founder and team lead of Muse Games, an independent game studio located in New York City that exclusively uses Unity3D to develop across desktop, mobile, and console platforms. Our projects include Guns of Icarus, a bad publisher and hurricane survivor, a multiple award winner, and a cross-platform top-seller on Steam, as well as it's PvE successor Guns of Icarus Alliance. Lately, we're also raising a kungfu possessed hamster beating up vermin to rid a city high on pollen of crime. In addition to making games, Howard serves as an advisor at the NYU Game Center and helps lead an indie dev and Unity3D user group in NYC.

Matthew Hartman is the marketing manager and community manager of Muse Games. He has been part of the team for over four years since the release of Guns of Icarus Online. He graduated the University of North Texas with a bachelors in Public Relations. 

Putting out fires, facing dark emotionless directors, and conquering ambition. That’s not only the description of Guns of Icarus Alliance, but the path we had to take to get this game out.

Guns of Icarus Alliance was not a project that a development team would ordinarily choose to pursue. It aimed to balance the creation of something new with the preservation and integration of something old. It was a dogmatic pursuit of an artistic and creative vision and the byproduct of persistence, and the fulfillment of a promise to players and community regardless of the cost in time and effort.

Some people said we were foolish dreamers. Some people said we took too much time, and others said we positioned or messaged it all wrong. The one thing nobody could say, though, was that we failed to deliver. 

"We made mistakes, accumulated new knowledge and experiences, and learned a lot."

While cooperative airship combat was something we had been dreaming about for years, Guns of Icarus Alliance was officially born from a Kickstarter campaign. We had already delivered the player-vs-player only Guns of Icarus Online, but we wanted to take our steampunk airship idea even further. We wanted to explore multiculturalism and cultural diversity across an entire steampunk-flavored world, craft unique and intense co-op experiences, create a worldview, and deliver more on diversity of combat experiences against variable and intelligent AI.

The vision and promise of that Kickstarter campaign ended up taking three long years to fulfill. In that span, we built complex AI flight, combat, and tactical models from scratch with no previous experience. We also built a dynamic AI director to ensure that match experiences are never quite the same and that AI enemies dynamically respond to player tactics and actions.

We created a faction warfare metagame that allowed us to dive pretty deeply into different cultural and aesthetics influences across the world from mid-1800s to the eve of the Great War. We created brand new gameplay experiences while figuring out how to support our loyal legacy community through Steam, which went pretty far outside the scope of Steam’s backend and support.

Along the way we made mistakes, accumulated new knowledge and experiences, and learned a lot. Here are the key lessons we learned…

Yes, Guns of Icarus is a co-op game, so listing “cooperation” as something we did right might seem like a bit of a cheap shot. Yet, to actually transition from PvP (player-vs-player) to PvE (player-vs-environment) while maintaining the same level of teamwork for a vastly different playstyle was much harder than we expected.

From the very first word of our design, we knew we wanted a game that didn’t just claim teamwork but embodied it in every aspect of gameplay. The pilot can’t fly if the engines aren’t repaired by the engineers, and the gunners can’t shoot if the pilot hasn’t positioned the airship correctly. We wanted our players to truly be a cohesive crew, sharing in the glory of every kill and win.

In Guns of Icarus Online PvP matches the focus is on smaller engagements, so the tactical teamwork and coordination happens across a maximum of eight ships, with two balanced side fielding two to four ships each.

Guns of Icarus Alliance PvE is very different. Apart from the fact that players are now battling against AI-controlled opponents, the balance is also vastly different. PvE engagements are typically asymmetrical to some degree: many weak craft against a few powerful ones, airborne craft against a heavily-fortified defender on the ground, and so on.

Our goal was to create a sense of epic scope – your plucky crew taking on an entire armada to achieve one of a wide variety of objectives – but at the same time we had to preserve that core experience of hyper-teamwork, where everyone is required to work together. We ended up spending a lot of time running countless sessions of player testing; big and small, closed and open.

"The co-op focus in Guns of Icarus Alliance gave us more freedom to create varying objectives."

The balance oscillated between a small number of tougher enemies vs a greater number of enemies coming from more directions. We iterated the design of the boss many times,  trying to find a level of difficulty that would require coordination between multiple allied ships without being too powerful. Whenever the testers were wiped out, we had to ask ourselves if they had failed to work together adequately or if the challenge really was too high.

Another major change in PvE was tuning the difficulty to accommodate different levels of player mastery, requiring us to not only tune the various enemy combat parameters but the AI director as well. The enemy spawn rate and the trigger for the mission-ending crescendo event had to not only scale with difficulty but also with number of ships and player crew.

The co-op focus in Guns of Icarus Alliance gave us more freedom to create varying objectives, ranging from base defense to convoy pursuit and search-and-destroy. We also had more freedom to create and design more imaginative and wild weaponry, airships, and abilities. In addition to the stock machine guns and rockets, we now had light beams, Tesla coils, and cavitation weapons, and we added abilities that allow pilots to drift, engineers to deploy drones, and gunners to massively buff weapons. All these elements enabled us to craft a different teamwork experience that is more about achieving disparate objectives and giving crews the opportunity to be heroic during well-planned opportunities and openings.

Finally, we were able to support our more casual players by adding support for single ships, providing an entry point for those who aren’t attracted to highly-competitive play.

Between weekly posts on development and three streams a week playing with the community and answering questions, we take great pride on being available for players. This effort has been richly rewarded , with players helping us at conventions, donating computers, helping out with a pretty grueling hardcore testing regime, and even writing 11,000 word dissertations of detailed feedback.

We know many of our best players on a first name basis, and quite a few of them have even dropped by our work space. We often spend so much time obsessing about what can be improved or what we did wrong that the simple joy of sitting down with a passionate gamer and hearing how they love the changes to the war system or their reasons one ship is the favorite help keep us sane.

Our openness and dedication also earned us forgiveness for mistakes. Every process would inevitably hit road bumps because we have different constituencies with varying perspectives, interests, and playstyles. Despite these mishaps, our players learned that we really were listening to them, so they would stay with us through server breakdowns and mistakes, trusting that we were working hard to resolve any issues. In fact, we have 1,500 examples of player feedback leading directly to fixes and features. We’ve never had a big player base, so being engaged with our community is that much more important For an online-only game, player base is life. It makes sense to look after them.

If it isn’t obvious, we love steampunk. It’s an aesthetic that doesn’t get the love it deserves, and when it gets explored (including Guns of Icarus Online) it rarely, if ever, ventures outside Victorian England.

With Guns of Icarus Alliance we had the opportunity to create an entire steampunk world, complete with starkly different factions. In order to realize that vision, we researched and sampled cultures around the world within the Victorian time period leading up to the Great War, and imagined what they might have evolved into in a post-apocalyptic world with steam technology. From the northern wastes of the Anglean Republic to the desert nomads of the Arashi, we created cultural identities within the game by deeply referencing cultures and aesthetics around the world during that time period, and it’s been an amazing learning experience for us as well.

Beyond aesthetics and attire, we wanted to imbue each the faction with their own value system, ethos, and set of beliefs. Players responded to this instantly: the Republic, for example, is the home of our Russian player base, as its power, style, and tech focus resonated with them. Getting to explore everything from a dynastic worldview to an industrial statesman merchant fleet injected our world with color, life, and substance that are missing from many other works in the steampunk genre.

Beyond incremental funding, the value of Kickstarter for us lies in community building and getting the word out. It provides an early platform to put our hopes and dreams out there for prospective players to share, validate, refine, and give feedback. 

We learned a lot during the Kickstarter campaign for Guns of Icarus Alliance, and incorporated a lot of the feedback that would be featured in the game. We put our early adopters through the wringer in terms of testing. They suffered through server breakdowns, maniacal incarnations of the AI director, planes that crashed into mountains, and horrible frame drops. They stuck with us through thick and thin, and for that we are incredibly grateful. 

Guns of Icarus Online is our over four years old and a PvP game, but despite its age it has had players in it 24/7 since its release. We wanted to reward this player loyalty by continuing to support this title while working on Guns of Icarus Alliance as a full new experience focused entirely on PvE.

This decision added a lot of work and complexity, and presented very unique challenges (unfortunately, I’ll be getting to those in the “What went wrong?” part of this article). We had to ensure that the PvP arsenal and ships would all work with PvE objectives and maps and revamp the UI and match system to integrate everything,. All the while we had to ensure that social and communication systems worked not only between both versions, but also between players who owned Guns of Icarus Alliance and those who only had Guns of Icarus Online.

Working with the Steam API was incredibly difficult, for instance, as there were no precedents or earlier use cases that we could draw from. We ended up finding creative solutions to ensure that voice communications, Steam Achievements, player data, and game time could all be shared between two disparate games seamlessly. We decided to do this out of the dogged or even dogmatic commitment we’d made as a team to support our existing player base, no matter what the cost was. I definitely think that it was worth it to build a foundation for the Guns of Icarus Alliance player base, and it’s especially important given our small indie community.

Kickstarter was one of the first steps for us as we started our development journey for Guns of Icarus Alliance. With the lessons learned from that experience, I doubt I would launch another Kickstarter campaign at such an early stages of conception and design.

"The primary lessons: First, establish tight, clear communication of your project’s scope and vision. Second, consider bootstrapping more in the earlier stages of development and try to run any Kickstarter campaign only after a solid design has been finalized."

Our intent with the Kickstarter was to convey our grand and ambitious vision, an ultimate pie-in-the-sky goal. We knew it was a risk: if we didn’t get enough funding, and if Guns of Icarus Online sales declined, we would have a very hard time realizing our vision. To mitigate that risk we broke features up, tying different milestones to various funding tiers and goals. This would ensure that, at a minimum, we would deliver a solid co-op airship combat experience, even if it was missing some of our wishlist features.

The problem was expectations. While Guns of Icarus Alliance actually delivered more than was promised based on the achieved Kickstarter stretch goals, some people definitely felt we under delivered. The negative feelings springing from this confusion and belief they had been let down were carried forward into the development process and through to release. We tried our best to make peace with the people who were disappointed, offering refunds and extra rewards, and tried to be as diligent as possible in responding to their messages. 

I think the primary lessons to take from this are twofold. First, establish tight, clear communication of your project’s scope and vision. Second, consider bootstrapping more in the earlier stages of development and try to run any Kickstarter campaign only after a solid design has been finalized. Some backers form a very fixed idea of what they are backing and will refuse to allow any slack or flexibility during the development process for the developer to adjust the project.

We released Guns of Icarus Online literally in the eye of Hurricane Sandy, and as much as we tried to avoid it, it seems like the entire series is fated to suffer through launch crises.

We released Guns of Icarus Alliance on Steam in a way that has never been done before (gulp...) allowing players in two games (Guns of Icarus Online and Guns of Icarus Alliance) to contact each other in-game and share data, communications, and achievements across two Steam App IDs.

This allowed us to support both the PvP and PvE experiences, look after the legacy community, and make sure we were keeping the community together and not splitting our player base.

Unfortunately, since nobody had ever been foolish enough to attempt this before, nobody else had gone through the same experience to map out the territory. This was exacerbated by the fact that there was only do so much testing we could do on our own pre-release, so we went live on launch day and plowed straight into unknown waters.

We ran into massive problems with Steam’s backend configurations (with our new, previously untried communications system - go figure!) with the main issue being that Alliance appeared to have nobody playing. This caused a chain reaction: nobody was able to review the game for the first three days, which in turn led to it appearing to be completely dead on arrival with no one owning or playing it, and this then led to Steam not featuring it on the front page of the store despite it being a top seller.

We also did not do a good enough job explaining this to our players, which resulted in accusations of us trying to squeeze money out of players, so dismay and confusion were voluminous in our player base on launch day.

This was disappointing and painful for us, because the long hours we had spent trying to bridge the legacy product ended up being a source of confusion and negativity. We received criticism about packaging (“Why are you launch DLC as a separate game?”) and pricing (“I’m been a loyal player for years, so why do I have to pay for new content?”). In our excitement about Alliance we simply failed to consider how all the things we thought were exciting new features and content might be interpreted differently by some of our players.

In an effort to smooth this over, I drafted an open letter to the community addressing all of the major criticisms, as well as replying personally to every complaint. These efforts helped to a degree, but there is still a lot of work to do. Moving forward we will need to demonstrate our continued support for the legacy  game and its dedicated players, and generate cost-effective content to win these players back.

We were also forced to ban several well-known trolls for toxic behavior over the course of the last few years for hacking the steam client, leaving negative reviews without actually playing the game, and simply making things up in the Steam forums. With legitimate players and voices largely absent at launch, that added to our pain. What was supposed to be a day of glory and celebration turned into a weekend of putting out fires and stressing out about missed opportunities. (What else is new?)

Thankfully, the strength of our community shone through and we were able to get quite a bit of organic traffic to overcome the headwind and salvage our launch. With everything taken into account, all in all the launch went pretty decently, but we definitely could have done better. Some of the problems were unavoidable, the result of unforeseen complications, but a lot of it was squarely on us in terms of presenting better messaging to existing players. This is something we definitely need to do a better job of now and in the future. 

With Guns of Icarus Alliance, we felt that with PvE, co-op gameplay, and the huge amount of content we were prepping it was going to something very new and original. Based on that, we decided very early in the development process that it would work best being released as a new game rather than an expansion. The scope, effort, and time we put into Alliance made it deserving of its own full release, and it was our job to convince players, press, and anyone who’d listen that this was a full and real experience.

This presented us with two distinct challenges. One was our communication on Kickstarter, where we clearly defined it as an expansion. The other was making this work on Steam while still supporting our legacy player base, as detailed above. We also wanted to reward our Kickstarter backers’ early testing by offering a DLC with pre-order, which in itself was novel with Steam’s back-end systems.

In the months leading up to release we explored different possibilities through Steam, ranging from relaunching the existing Guns of Icarus Online store page to creating a new store page connected from the old. Each had advantages but also significant risks and drawbacks. Following Steam’s recommendation about a month before release, we finally arrived at our current solution: release Alliance on its own store page with links from the old Online store page that tempt owners of the older game to visit the new page with a loyalty discount, and and also putting the old game on sale.

This meandering route of new creations and adjustments to old assets created confusion in people who thought this was going to be a DLC. Quirks of the Steam system also meant that people who were entitled to a discount could only see it on the Alliance store page itself, which led to even more confusion.

Because Guns of Icarus is a continuing series, many people would read the title in the subject line or headline of an email or newsletter and make assumptions about what Alliance would be. Many assumed it was just a minor expansion, like a map pack, and even today we face a lot of headwind. Yet, it’s also a great opportunity and a fresh challenge for us. With the new content that we’re planning, we’ll continue to have chances to re-engage with the players who owned Guns of Icarus Online. Each new content update will also present an opportunity to explore fresh ideas about how to reach out to players and the media.

As usual, we cherish every opportunity that comes our way, and we pour our heart and soul into every piece of writing, correspondence, or marketing material to share this game we’re so proud of. Rough stretches, challenges, and mistakes keep us humble, creative, and open to explore and cherish new opportunities. 

Guns of Icarus Online has a sizable international audience with concentrations of players in Japan and in Russia. Both of these surprised us initially with video casters we’d never heard of checking out the game and bringing in audiences we never targeted or anticipated. They became amazing supporters of our ideas and great members of the community. It was a huge and completely unexpected disappointment for us that we could not give them adequate language support.

With the scale and ambition of our project and the small size of our team, we failed to allocate adequate resources for localization, meaning that localization is now a near-impossibility within the existing game framework. It pains us to know that there are many players who had a difficult playing experience, and others who missed out on the game altogether, all because it only provides support for English-speaking players.

Any project we take on in future will have localization factored into the design at a very early stage, and we will make sure we have the resources to do it well. 

One last mechanical issue is the game’s teaching systems. Running an airship is a complex experience, and every crew member needs to be doing their job well, because their mistakes aren’t just frustrating for them but for the entire team. With that in mind, we built a complete tutorial system that can teach anyone how to be a valuable crew member.

That tutorial has never been perfect, though. It’s gone through many iterations and tweaks, and even today we could go back and touch places where it’s probably too heavy handed or could be made more engaging.

We love our game and stand by what we’ve made, but it is very hardcore and has a very steep learning curve, even with a supportive, cooperative team. Based on player feedback, we’ve gone back and improved the flow of the tutorial immensely. We sought feedback not only from players or would-be players, but also from our wives, boyfriends, and even a few siblings who have never gamed before, asking them to run through it and highlight any deficiencies.

The lesson, really, is that a tutorial system for a game this complicated is always going to be a massive design challenge, so give it the time and resources it needs.

We will never stop being dreamers, nor lose the ambition to try and push ourselves to create something new and different. Every mistake we have made became a lesson that was seared into our minds, and throughout the development and release of Guns of Icarus Alliance, we’ve made plenty of them.

Our goals now revolve around content releases that we’ve already prepped for, in addition to getting the word out to even more people. Coming up next is the impending release of two brand new factions, each equipped with all-new weapons and airships, alongside a shiny new game mode where players ambush unsuspecting AI targets. We’re also working hard on taking Guns of Icarus Alliance to the PlayStation 4, which is exciting because it’s our first experience with a console release. It’s also one more commitment we get to fulfill after a long odyssey.

[greenlil]

Thoughts on being a black woman in ultimate frisbee

It was in early autumn of 2013 when one of the ex-co members of Flying Tigers asked:

“Lillian, would you be willing to co-captain second team?”

 Instead of the typical excitement that one is supposed to have when given the chance to captain a highly performing sports team, I was overwhelmed by nervousness and fear. I had only been playing Ultimate for a year and I still felt inadequate. I felt inadequate for two reasons: I felt I was not athletic enough to teach Ultimate Frisbee to competitive players and I was a black woman who was going to teach a group of white teenagers who’ve just started university.

How could this be? Lillian, who had grown up in Mankweng Township in Limpopo Province and only ever been an unimportant player when given the chance to do sports? Where I come from, if you are a boy, you play soccer and if you are a girl, netball is your only option. My performance at netball was not impressive at all. The best I did was when I was selected as a reserve player for the second team.  From then on, I accepted that sport was not my thing and decided to focus on my academics. Ten years later, I was placed in a leadership position for a fast-paced, fun, co-ed sport called Ultimate Frisbee at the best university in Africa.

The first challenge with this position was being a woman. In most sporting codes, men (apparently because of their physiological build) are faster and stronger than women, or so we are made to believe.  In almost every sport, males and females never play against each other. So regardless of any other physiological attributes, the sexual organs that one possess determine who your opponent will be. So here I was leading a team that was dominated by males. I was expected to help support them to become better athletes, even though society tells me that I can never be a better athlete than a male player even if we get equal training. There is also this aggressive masculinity that is associated with sports, where the most aggressive, angry-looking players are deemed the most dedicated or the best. Gentleness, softness, love, patience and kindness are not often associated with competitive sportsmanship, and here I was (with a strong preference for the latter values) not feeling good enough to work in this position. But who do you tell? Do you say to your team, “No thanks, I think I am too feminine for this position?” But this made me realise how important it is for us, the Ultimate community, to think about incorporating women. Not just as ‘extra’ players, but as key individuals who are given the capacity to lead teams in various ways. Fortunately, there has been some effort to empower women in this regard, but we should not get tired or forget the importance of doing this task because it is where role models for future generations of Ultimate players are made.

Perhaps what was more daunting for me was that I was not just a woman, but that I was a black woman. In South Africa (and the world over), the relationship between a black woman and a white man has always been a contested, complex one with many power dynamics. Growing up, I was always told that everything white is superior to anything black. In fact, the word ‘baas’ is the default name for any white man that many people in my community come across. Even if one may be more educated, or older than that white man, they’d have to refer to him as boss. For his whole life, my dad has never seen a white person learn (or admit to learning) from a black person, except a few insignificant words in Sepedi such as ‘thobela’(hello) and ‘ke a leboga,’ (thank you) –which would both be terribly pronounced anyway. When I dated a white boy some time ago, the first comment my dad made upon finding out was: “does he not find you disgusting?” That comment made me very sad; for if it had been a black boy, he would have asked if that boy deserved his princess. But then when I thought about my father’s upbringing, black women only worked to serve tea to white masters and their children. There was no case of a black woman being in a superior position to a white man. If any interaction, a white man was expected to beat up a black person for some perceived wrongdoing. The only good thing a black person was applauded for doing (that was not a menial task) was being an ‘informer.’ My dad could not imagine a black woman teaching a white man anything, let alone being attractive to a white man.

You may ask yourself what this had to do with my experience being co-captain. What you need to understand is that I am my father’s daughter. Most things I know in this world, I was taught by him and my mom. Now, coming into a leadership position where the positions are reversed: the white athletes looking up the black athlete for ways to improve their play in ultimate. The black girl has been told for more than 20 years that she is inferior to anything that is white. The black woman has been told that the only way to be successful in life is if she is more ‘white.’ Therefore, blackness is not synonymous with success in today’s world. The psychological impact of growing up with this doctrine goes far too deep and cannot be undone easily. I have been privileged to have accessed an education that tries to teach me about the works and contributions of my people, and this has begun to give me confidence to navigate some of the boundaries of the white superiority/black inferiority complex. This is why for example, I even joined this white-dominated sport; because I believed that there were no super-powers associated with whiteness that made them good at this game. I too could learn how to play. But there are many who have not been as lucky as me. And if these are the people that will be recruited into playing this sport, then it is important to understand (or at least listen) to their stories, perceptions and experience related to race that may make it difficult for them to join or thrive in the sport.

To be honest, the actual co-captaining work was not difficult. I worked with a very hard-working and enthusiastic lady. She made the effort to include me in all the decisions regarding team placement, player positions, organising practice and also giving feedback to players on the field. She was the reason why this daunting task became more doable and enjoyable. Was it because she was a white foreigner to South Africa? I don’t know. Although my own development as a player was delayed because I was focusing on that of the new players, the satisfaction I got from seeing the new players become stellar athletes within a few months warmed my heart enough for me to not feel like I have made a loss. Teaching is my passion and having had the opportunity to teach someone how to hold a disc, how not to run in a vertical stack or how to make a stall count gave me immense pleasure. So even though in my head it was wrong for a black woman to teach a white man anything, with the help of my co-captain and the committee at the time, I felt respected and was happy with my contribution to the team. The only major thing that made me feel disrespected was when some of the white players referred to me as Thulie. Thulie was the only other black girl at the time, and I felt offended that those players could not differentiate us. She and I are not even related. So when someone calls me Thulie, it says to my head that they have decided to replace ‘black female player’ with ‘Thulie’ and will not bother to learn actual names of the other black female players. Where I come from, a name is everything. Actually, there is a belief in my culture that if a baby is given a name that is not destined for them, he/she will cry until the correct name is given unto them from the ancestors. After my family went through all the effort of naming and renaming me until I became Matjie Lillian Maboya, someone just decided to call me in someone else’s name. I guess what I am trying to say is, we need to have open, safe spaces where race and issues related to it are discussed and addressed. The Ultimate community cannot continue to exist as though we are not aware of the ways in which skin colour has given each of us a different upbringing and continues to dictate how we interact with one another and with the game. I do not know how exactly this should be done, but I am asking at least for each of us to do personal reflections of how we portray thoughtfulness, sensitivity and consideration to race on and off the field.