PixlBit

You're absolutely right Mike, the idea is very ambitious and it's extremely easy to let concepts and visions reach far enough to the point where they are no longer realistically achievable or profitable at the current time. I can't let the ambition and pride get to my head too much, because then nothing would ever get done. I love to come up with level designs, mechanics, and concepts, but I absolutely have to have people around me that keep it down to earth and realistic.

The way I've always seen design and the development process is that when you're at the very beginning sitting with your team mates conceptualizing what you want to accomplish with a project, it's the best and only time really where you can "reach for the stars". The rest of the cycle is spent implementing, testing, evolving, and figuring out how much or your original dream you really need to make the game you want to make.

The team could reach for the stars, inevitably miss (which is natural and okay), and start scaling back to figure out what they can do with the ideas they have. As opposed to not dreaming big enough, and not having anything to cut, or scale back. I have no idea how successful that plan would be and if it would amount to better games, but I think it's possible it could. I'm young, inexperienced, naive, and I have plenty of time to learn and be proven wrong, so I'll be willing to adapt. As long as were making the best games we possibly can, challenge our boundaries, make games we want to play, are proud of, and don't make excuses for, I'd be as flexible as I could.

A huge problem with the ideas I was presenting is that there's so many options for alternative thinking, how will you teach the player these possibilities exist? If you were in the military attending survival trainings it would take months to expose a candidate to various situations, show them possibilities, and let them evolve over time with their decision making. You don't have months to teach a player anything in a game lol. I saw that Portal 2 was your GOTY winner and one of the things I was so inspired by in Portal 2 was the pacing and learning curve they ended up with. I kept learning throughout the whole game, never felt like I was in a rudimentary learning section ( learning to crouch, jump, etc) but the way the game taught me to play was so natural. Mechanics kept getting added but it was never unnecessary or boring. When I was introduced to a new environment I never felt I couldn't accomplish a task, but I was challenged and required to use my brain in fun ways. Such a beautiful design, I'm going to spend quite a while studying that game and its design much like I study all of Valve's other works.

I absolutely appreciate your constructive criticism, observations, and conclusions Mike. In fact I need them. A level designer will never get better if they begin to think they've learned everything they need. This is perfectly true in my case because I'm barely beginning this whole process. I don't even have a degree or experience in the field yet. One of the reasons I love to hang out around here and be part of this great community is because the staff and community here are smart passionate gamers, and I like to learn from conversations everybody has with me and with others. I get to learn about the industry, gaming history, and I get opportunities to subtly study why people care about their games, what they want from games, why this art form matters to us all etc. I love hearing people dissect level designs and mechanics they like and don't like and why. Even with great little conversations like this, all this data will pile straight into my brain, I'll think about it all, and over time it might evolve my understanding of design in some small or great ways.

I agree when you said you're not sure if these kinds of concepts and designs would be possible in our current industry with our current tech, I don't think they could be fully achieved either but that might not always be the case. I've always had a hard time of coming up with concepts that fit a current generation, but maybe in several years once I have the education and field experience I need, the tech might start showing the power to do what we dream of it doing. It might be optimism to the point of being unrealistic, but I'm hoping that these more ambitious designs won't be far-fetched for ever.

I'm really glad Portal got the love it deserved. I think it was the best designed game of the year and accomplished what it set out to and more. I think it's Valve's best designed game to date, I had a lot of fun with it in both SP and Co-op, and I can't dispute it's GOTY win.

I was afraid that people with short memories would forget all about it. It's pretty pessimistic but I was actually assuming that Portal wouldn't even make the short list for you guys. I had the same fear back when Mass Effect 2 came out and it was so amazing, but so much time had gone by when it was time to start voting for GOTY that I thought everybody in the gaming journalism and reviewing field would've forgotten all about it and focused on the later 2010 releases like Halo Reach, Black Ops, Fallout New Vegas and such.

I love your ideas Jesse. I actually get a lot of my gaming level design and mechanic ideas from watching horror movies or television. Often when I'm watching The Walking Dead I see a character in a situation where I think, "That's intense, that's compelling. How could we adapt that to a game that would be interactive, make sense, and be every bit as compelling?" In most games you never find yourself scared for your life, stuck in a closet, evading, hoping the enemy doesn't hear or sense you. In games you just enter a door, sooner or later enemies notice you, and you start plugging away with a weapon till everybody is dead at your feet. I want to play a game where it isn't that simple. Fighting zombies and enemies should be more complex and taxing on your decision making, similar to how some of the Big Daddy fights in Bioshock were for me. In real life you should never ever be willing to go into combat, put up your fists, knife, bat, or gun against an enemy unless you're fully prepared to win or fail, kill or die, you know? That's how I felt in Bioshock at times, and that's how a survival game should be. Don't fire a weapon or attack a Big Daddy unless you're dead fucking serious about it, have that killer instinct, and a plan. We could do the same with zombies whether they're isolated or in groups.

Your idea about having noise attract more zombies is perfect. I love the idea of the environment around the player not being too predictable, being very dynamic, and based on whatever chain of events a player is experiencing during his specific playthrough, he will have to react in his own ways to each situation and none of those choices should be "wrong" unless you die of course or get infected. I also like your idea of making a player vulnerable to infection and failure, on top of all the other means of death like blunt trauma, lacerations, fire, electricity, etc. What I've started to realize over time is that I don't like it when fans demand a game be a certain length, and the designers force themselves to try and appease that. How is a 15 hour experience more valid than a 7 hour one? It's the same mess that game review score scales get into when you compare a 9.3 score to a 6.1. People start focusing on the arithmetic and quantity instead of the quality. If you start forcing yourself to create a certain length of gameplay, it absolutely changes the way you think about level design, mechanics, and pacing.

I'd rather create a dynamic environment that the player could effect, be affected by, and have to work through or around at their own pace and style. Maybe that little house sequence could be farily inconsequential for one player because he evades the single zombie, doesn't attract others, and escapes, taking a whole of 10 minutes or less. Maybe he decides to hold down the fort, plan a way to kill the zombie and it takes him 20 minutes, maybe something goes wrong and a group of zombies is attracted but the player decides to stay and attempt to kill them all. If it ends up taking him 30 minutes in that single encounter space, that's great. Think about the guy who escaped the house and got out in less than 10 minutes silently, how is that guys experience less valid for him? If the player is fulfilled and had a quality experience playing the game the way they wanted to, who's to say it's wrong?

Gamers whine about not having enough options in games, but at the same time they cry out for games to be certain lengths. If you want a game to be a certain length for the majority of players and reduce the spread and variability of the average completion time, it will require the design team to reduce the amount of options you have and the amount of situations the player could possibly find himself in. Linearity isn't a bad thing at all, but it is if your whole concept for a game is to make it more open and dynamic. I think open world level designs, dynamic environments, and dynamic AI would be the best ways to accomplish the kind of survival feeling were talking about. RE5 is a fun game, but in its design it shoots for action, linearity, and looses the survival element, albeit while adding fun action elements.

I agree with Julian on Resident Evil 6. It wouldn't be a bad idea to scrap the multiplayer and return to an isolated atmosphere. RE5 was fun and I liked a lot of the action oriented level designs and feel of the weapons, but it was missing any of the atmosphere and intensity that RE4 established. Being a STARS member is cool, having modern weapons, and plugging zombies is still fun, but they should take the co-op out of the campaigns at least because we need the isolation back in horror games. Adding a lot of action to the series was a great idea, but I think they need to scale back and try to balance it out with the horror. I'm not skeptical at all that they can accomplish this, because I've seen the formula work really well before multiple times in the F.E.A.R. series and Condemned. Those two series have established the formula of heavy action and creepy horror since the beginning and I love those games, does anybody on the panel like those games as well? The antagonist from F.E.A.R., Alma, is the first and only video game character I ever had a nightmare about lol. She scares me really bad.

The F.E.A.R. and Condemned series aren't "survival" games, but I don't think the survival genre has ever existed and I'll explain why. Just depriving a player of ammo by itself, to me, doesn't equate to surviving. You have to add a ton to that to make a person feel like they're surviving and you have to change your level designs and expectations for encounters greatly. Human beings haven't evolved and survived on Earth by being sexy "top" agents and just going rambo for a million years. I would love to have RE6 retain the action and weapons, but the game needs to force you to think outside the rambo mentality during the game. Each level should be built to give the player action options and stealth options. If you're given less ammo, maybe you will use your rambo mentality to blast through an encounter space and level some waves of zombies only to realize you used up all your ammo and that strategy won't work in the next space. A similar design was present in the original RE but there wasn't any stealth or anything. The excitement simply came from seeing a zombie chase you down a corridor and hoping you could get to door fast enough and leave the area.

It think it would be better to have that zombie chasing you through doors and environments, deny you that comfort, and maybe make you interact with the environment by hiding in a closet, climbing out a window and looking for a safe way to escape, etc. Maybe you could simply evade the zombie using pure stealth, or you could concoct a way to kill it like sneaking your way around the house to find a knife and attack the zombie with it, or hide outside the window you got through and pull the zombie through it like Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell. Perhaps a group of zombies find their way to the house, you find yourself with a predicament, and concoct a way to pour some gasoline around, light it with a zippo, and burn them all to hell? Maybe none of that happens during your particular play-through and you just jump out the window, get down safely, and run for your life to somewhere else. Let the player choose. Just because the later option is less action oriented doesn't mean the player is doing something wrong, because in fact, the player is surviving, the way they want to. Their could be some kind of AI Director similar to the one Valve used in L4D2.

The design should make you have to adapt, evolve strategies, and "survive" by occasionally sneaking around in the next areas, and if you get caught in sticky situations you might just have to run for your life and evade in fun engaging ways with the environment. Not in scripted quick time events either. By simply playing the game the way you want to play it in realtime, you should eventually naturally be forced to encounter situations where your tactics won't work and you have to think and come up with something new just like people in survival situations have to confront. To an extent you have to take away the empowerment, comfort, and reliability all the action gives you and force players to figure out how to deal with the horror, survival, and "realism" if you want to call it that.

Get people to think with their animal instincts at times, as well as their own internal logic, reasoning, and problem solving skills. Present them with intense situations that they will have to figure out how they want to deal with, instead of just allowing them to compile hundreds of rounds of ammo, rocket launchers, piles of cash, confidence, machismo, stroll into environments, and vaporize threats as they laugh with their co-op buddy. If you take all that away from them and see if they can still make independent decisions, adapt, and survive, maybe that's what's truly macho. That player can continue to chug his mountain dew and sit down comfortably to play his game, but while he's playing he needs to be starkly confronted with isolation, stress, discomfort, conflict, decision making, creepy atmospheres, terror, and the unknown. I would love that game, but would anybody play it? Would you play that kind of take on "survival"?

It's ambitious but it's achievable. Look at what games like Skyrim achieve with their scope and non-linearity. Look at what games like Splinter Cell and Assassin's Creed do by letting you deal with enemies in different ways, as well as how they let you interact with the environment via haystacks, sneaking, hiding, etc. Look at what the AI Direction in L4D2 did to alter the pacing of encounters.

Great job I really liked this. Since this is episode one I assume this feature is a new addition to the site, correct? I hope you plan to keep these weekly updates coming, I thought it was really well done and I got learned quite a bit because I missed the VGA's and didn't hear about those particular trailers till now. The FortNite video looks really great, but what got me excited was when you referenced the game's similarity to Team Fortress 2's art style, I love TF2. Naughty Dog's The Last of Us video looks really great but my first instinct was to not take the trailer too seriously because of what happened with Dead Islands trailer, and then the eventual realization that the actual narrative and tone of the game was quite different than the trailer led us to believe. I wouldn't mind getting on a modest hype train for the game though and the reason why is because Naughty Dog is making it. I'll be excited to see gameplay videos and more in depth showcases for the game in the future.

Another great discussion guys! I have a question. Where did the intro theme song for the podcasts come from? I love listening to the short 23 seconds or so of the guitar riffs because it's atmospheric, triggers memories, and makes me feel like I'm playing Cabela's Dangerous Hunts lol. I've had the original 2003 Xbox version of Dangerous Hunts all these years and my friend and I still play it as if it hasn't aged a day. Thank shit that it's included in the games that are backwards compatible for 360. Some of the level designs and mechanics are timeless in that game. It never gets old taking hail Mary sniper shots across an entire level, using the bullet camera to watch your shot sail through trees, over water and hills, slowly arc and loose steam in its trajectory, and eventually plow straight into a moose several hundred yards away. Just about the most satisfaction I've ever had killing enemies with a sniper in an FPS, every bit as good as exploding people's heads in Gears of War.

This wasn't only an incredible holiday season for games, but it was a great year for games. Winter saw Dead Space 2, spring saw Portal 2 and Crysis 2, summer saw Catherine, and when Gears 3 started the fall/holiday season all shit hit the fan and plenty of great games followed in the ensuing couple months. At the moment there's literally hundreds of dollars worth of great games out there that are worth picking up for full price, I just can't and so over the year I've had to spend painful amounts of time prioritizing and figuring out what I want the most. There's so many of these games that are posting absurd sales numbers and looking plainly at the math it lets me know the industry is doing just fine, people are still playing games, and our art form isn't going anywhere but up, which is what we need at this point in hardware and game design evolution.

I'm looking to Nintendo to come out swinging with the Wii U. They need to renew my faith that they can make great consoles. With the Wii they thought outside the box and I commend them for it, but they also though so far outside the box that they left everybody behind and nobody wanted to follow. I love Nintendo but I didn't adopt the Wii because mechanically I didn't want to play it, it was as simple and unforgiving as that. I want to play Mario, Zelda, and Metroid like I grew up playing but I feel like I got punched in the nuts when they told me I had to either play with motion controls or not play my favorite games at all. I sided against them. Therefore I've missed out on all this generation's 1st party Nintendo titles.

It's a fact that Nintendo employs great designers, and they make some of the greatest games on the market, but what I want them to do is make a console that's worthy of the experiences of the games they're making, capable of letting those games evolve and grow. The Wii needs to die in its current form. The knowledge, lessons learned, successes, and failures all need to be extracted from it and used to build something greater. Godspeed to Nintendo's R&D department and engineers. Make this work, and prove you're as great as you assume you are. Prove you're as great as I know you are. I haven't spent a dime on a Nintendo product since the GC version of Twilight Princess in 2006, but when this new console cycle starts for them, I want to be able to spend on them again.

The guys over at Nintendo, especially guys like Reggie involved with much of the PR, don't get paid to tell us they're struggling or in need of new life. It's their job to tell us they're just fine and still making dreams come true. I believe that under that positive PR guise though there are some brilliant, honest, self-aware people who aren't fools and know they have a lot of work to do and have plenty of bridges to build in order to get people raving for their hardware again.

I have a casual question for the group but I'm not sure if it qualifies for something that should be part of a larger podcast entry or just a simple question that we could talk about here in this one thread. The question is:

Is there a particular year that you regard as your favorite year in gaming?

My own favorite year in gaming has always been 2007, it was like the orgasm of my gaming life and literally every year that has passed since then has felt like aftershock or aftermath. A lot of amazing titles came out that year that I'm nostalgic for like The Orange Box (Portal, HL2 episodes, Team Fortress 2), Bioshock, Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, and Mass Effect among others. Not only were the games great that year, but everything was so fresh. Most of the great sequels I look forward to these days had their beginning in 2007. Unforgettable, inspiring, innovative, quality gaming experiences were had that year, and in bulk no less.

One of the reasons I wasn't sure if it was best as a simple question or a topic to include in a podcast is because I could imagine you all taking time in a future podcast to describe a favorite year in gaming and why it was important to you. Maybe not as a whole podcast but at least as part of one. From the two podcasts that I've listened to, you guys do a great job of discussing current news, game experiences, trends, and giving your commentary on them which is awesome. However when the dry months come around, there's less news, and less games, you guys should shake up the content and do podcasts where you talk gaming from angles other than news. Like take up themes such as a favorite gaming year, nostalgia stories, what made you gamers, why you care about games, where you see gaming going in near or distant future hardware cycles, etc. I think themes like that are more personal and would allow people to get to not only know you better, but might also encourage listeners to share their own experiences.

You could also discuss gaming from a more artistic angle, or about the specific aspects of design. Like asking each other if game play king, how does good and bad animation affect the believability of a game world, is great art design more important to you than high resolution, does length of a video game matter, can a video game make you cry? Talk about examples of games you've played that fit the discussion or illustrate your points. I think it would be great to listen to those kinds of gaming discussions on top of all the other great stuff you guys already talk about.

P.S. Thanks for the shout-out and compliments on air Mike. I'm pretty humble but when I heard my name near the end of the session I couldn't help but give a fist pump in celebration lol. You guys have been having great discussions and it's been fun commenting on the topics. It's fascinating being here at the young humble stages of a growing fun gaming community/journalism site.

I also think a FPS Dead Space could be awesome. I think the problem people have with it is that they would expect it to be exactly like the 3rd person games, and it's not suppose to be, that's the whole point of experimenting. It's suppose to be different, but if you make it different, fun, and retain the atmosphere and pace of the 3rd person games it should be fine. You just have to sit down for a while and figure out what's fun about Dead Space 3rd person games, why the scares work, why the encounters are fun, how the levels are designed to give you the pacing and encounters you're custom to, and figure out fun ways to translate it to a 1st person view. If you come up with fun mechanics, exploration, encounters, and levels, it'll all be alright and coming up with those things are what we would get paid to do so I don't see it as quite as huge of a hurdle as some might see. On the most basic gameplay level Dead Space consists of simple exploration, observation, aiming around, and when enemies show up you shoot them. You can do that in 3rd or 1st person.

Think about it like this. If we were talking about a FPS game like Condemned and said we wanted to experiment and make the game into a fun 3rd person game, we could imagine people saying, "I don't see how that could work, Condemned is 1st person, it's just weird I don't know if it would be fun or feel right if we changed the perspective. How could it still be intense, atmospheric, and fun if we change to 3rd person?" Well if were working at Condemned and changing it to 3rd person, all we have to do is look to Dead Space for proof that 3rd person action horror games can be great. If the roles are switched, you could look at Condemned and see the proof that 1st person action horror games can be great. Therefore with some creativity you could definitely take Dead Space and make it an FPS. People just aren't custom to it, don't know what to expect, and don't have the vision to see the possible final product.

A more perfect example is the directors cut edition for the game Fatal Frame 2 Crimson Butterfly. Fatal Frame was originally a 3rd person game but when they came out with the directors cut edition of Crimson Butterfly they added a whole new optional 1st person mode and I've been playing the game in 1st person ever since and it doesn't detract from the game at it. It's a lot of fun and doesn't make it "not a Fatal Frame game".

When it comes to the whole Uncharted influence and action adventure gameplay route, in general I don't think it's a good idea atmosphere-wise for an entire Dead Space game, it would disrupt the pace people have enjoyed in the first 2 games. The only Uncharted influenced gameplay I could see working would be evasion and escape sequences, and the interactive cut-scene mechanic. Imagine scrambling your way across crumbling terrain down on an infected planet like Aegis 7 was in Dead Space 1. After landing on the planet and wreaking havoc on the necromorphs, The Hive Mind is mobilizing and shifting its body underneath the crust of the planet so certain areas of itself can surface to combat you with tentacles and other parts of its body and mechanisms we could come up with. It throws pieces of earth at you, transports necromorphs to you, and maybe there's parts of its body that have concentrated synapses or nerve centers and have the ability to distort your reality. You see hallucinations, false threats and enemies masking the real ones, horrifying scenes, blood filling canyons, fields of dead bodies, images of your family, all attempts by the Hive Mind to get Issac to loose focus. You can see huge pieces of the Hive Mind breaking up to the surface in the distance like giant Titans of Greek mythology. Artistically I can see it in my head and it's fucking epic and achievable in every way, you could literally put people into awe just like they would in an Uncharted game.

There's certainly some cutscenes or sequences that could be awesome, but I wouldn't want to make an entire game out of that. Especially a Dead Space game, it just doesn't feel right to a make a giant Dead Space interactive sequence. The fun of Dead Space is having complete control of Issac, moving slowly and suspiciously around atmospheric levels, and being able to enjoy the 30 seconds of fun when you spawn an encounter in a space, enemies show up and you need to dismember them or find the right strategy to kill them. You can do that in either 3rd or 1st person and it would be fun I think, but what you probably can't do is accomplish all of that with an entire Uncharted influenced action adventure game.

Uncharted games play out like movies and if anything you could make a Dead Space movie or anime that's Uncharted influenced.

Thanks Jesse. From the experience of writing out this blog I was really impressed at this current system already. It's pretty robust and there's way more options than I'm custom to at 1UP. Here I can actually change fonts, and have plenty of formatting options. It wasn't too difficult to write out my text in the font and size I wanted, as well as add a picture.

I'm going to keep playing with the system and site in general and if I have any complaints or suggestions I'll be sure to send a message to you guys.

I hope it's an absorption like Jesse says, as opposed to a closing. I like what they do at Tales and the Tales series itself it beautiful. I'd be upset if anything happened to it.

This is my first time listening to Pixltalk guys, I enjoyed it! I tried hard at the introduction to study each of your four voices so I would know who was talking at different times so I'd be able to chime in accurately after the fact, but I'm going to need some more time to memorize. So if I ever say things in generality like, "I agreed when you guys said..." please forgive me, it's not out of ignorance or poorly honed observational skills. I'll memorize everybody's voices before too long lol.

I've always tended to have, in the least, a mildly rational brain and so the intensity of the BF3 vs. MW3 fanboy debates (among others) never pull me in. I'm very passionate about playing my games as escapism, as well as learning to design them, but I usually keep it to myself, keep it in a context, or don't let it turn to fanboyism. Gaming shouldn't be about taking "sides". Fanboys seem to make an effort to show superiority, popularity, and dominance, which behaviorally all feel very high-school in nature and maturity. With the way that fanboys and vocal minorities affect our culture and industry, it makes me feel like they're treating this art like it's a system of high-school clicks fighting for their say, popularity, dominance, etc. Sometimes it seems like a survival of the fittest, the loudest, or a game of king of the hill, all of which feel common in a high-school setting.

This is an art form and due to that fact it will naturally develop a grand variety of connoisseurs, all of which should be free to diversify, feel empowered, and entertained without the need to resort to oft unnecessary irrational debates. We don't all need to play the same games, appreciate the same games, we don't all need to share the same experiences, or coalesce in some way. I read Halo novels and people who read Twilight don't berate me for it. I enjoy realist paintings and people who love abstract paintings don't berate me. The industry and culture needs to explode and expand like any general art form does. We focus too much on brand names and profits right now. Profits are great, I hope to make a profit off this art one day, but at its core this still an art and people should have respect for that. Da Vinci isn't a respected artist because of his name, he's famous for his works and merit. Not every idea he had was great, not every work he made is something I enjoy observing, but when I appreciate something of his it's because it's great not because it's a Da Vinci.

I love to study games, tear them apart, figure out what's fun, what's not, and how they could be improved, but I don't waste time comparing one brand name to another. I don't really even relate much with fanboys who loves the games I do lol. If I'm in a place where a fanboy conversation (frenzy) is on-going I usually slink outside the group and analyze them like animals in their natural habitat, from the outside looking in. That's pretty condescending but I can't help it, I feel so out of place in a situation like that. Fanboys don't see pros, cons, systems, and design. To fanboys a game is either, "Fucking rad." or it, "Fucking sucks." and often those beautifully articulated conclusions have little to do with a games' merit, design choices, achievements, failures, or simply honest comparison and contrast. Simply being a noob, a beast, a hardcore gamer, or a casual gamer isn't good enough because our industry and gaming community is so much more complex, various, and deserving of expansion than those terms would attempt to deny us. Those terms and restrictions in an of themselves seem like they were created by folk who have little business dictating to us what the industry and culture is, or should be. They are a vocal minority and I'm not bothered by the fact they exist, I'm just bothered by the fact that they seem to be the ones people listen to the most. Drama is much more entertaining than reason lol.

Healthy competition is necessary in this industry. Rational debate is much more effective than rants, and generally I prefer thinking as opposed to reacting. I don't believe the majority of the media and culture engage in a great deal of thought, rational debate, or encourage healthy competition. I forgot where I was or where I heard the comment but I overheard somebody one time saying that companies actually study some fanboy threads on forums, and that the ranting and arguing helps keep things competitive, creates hype, and can encourage companies to put out stronger products. I think that's a bad excuse for bad behavior. There was a lot of hype and console warring going on at the beginning of this cycle, and the consoles didn't prosper from it. The launches for 360 and PS3 were messes with the 360 RRoD, the PS3 price tag, lack of good games, and many other things. I don't buy the argument that fanboys benefit us in any way.

If I was designing a console or a game, the last place I would look for advice, encouragement, constructive criticism, or inspiration would be on a forum full of warring fanboys. I couldn't give less of a shit about them, even the ones who are on "my side" lol. I'd rather trust my teammates, my knowledge, experience, and analysis.