Design: April 2006 Archive Page

In my review of Once and Future, I made the erroneous statement -"Just like video killed the radio star, graphics killed the parser," and embarrassingly called interactive fiction a "dead genre." I was wrong. Five years after I typed those lines, interactive fiction games continue to be produced, even commercially. --Terrence Bosky --Something about Interactive Fiction (Moby Games)

The gathering was the monthly meeting of "Dorkbot," a loose forum for the exchange of creative technological ideas that is developing a cult following around the world.

[...]

Repetto has finished a project called "foal table." The idea originated in a request from a friend working on a theater production to design a table that transformed into a horse. Repetto watched videos of foals being born and carefully calibrated a mechanical table to make it walk in the awkward, stumbling manner of newborn horses.

"What it's supposed to do is ridiculous because it's a table and there is no reason for it to be walking," Repetto said.

The idea is therefore perfectly Dorkbot -- a name that Repetto says is meant to appeal to people who like to stand back and experience awe in technology and creativity. --'Dorkbot' Meetings Develop Cult Following

Reading this article made me go "Ahhh!" Now that's taking control of technology.

One item to discuss today is the final project for the class, your blogging portfolio. And among the items we need to consider are these:

* What should it include? (Will it highlight your best blogging, be an overview of what you tend to blog about and/or how you tend to blog, or a combination, or...?)

* What should it look like? (Will it be a blog entry? Will it be a separate web page?)

* How will it be assessed? --Donna Strickland -- Blogging Portfolio (English 4040)

I really like this teacher's effort to involve students in the discussion of how the blogging portfolio should be evaluated. Blogging is a means to a very specific end in the lit classes I'm teaching right now, but in the fall I'll be teaching Writing for the Internet again, and I'll want to be sure to include criteria that reward expressive and outrageous blogging, in addition to the intellectual and introspective blogging that I typically expect from students in lit classes.

Anyway, this is a great way of implementing in the class structure the kinds of collaborative, interactive communication structures that make blogging different from traditional essay writing.

The system's software goes beyond tracking simple emotions like sadness and anger to estimate complex mental states like agreeing, disagreeing, thinking, confused, concentrating and interested. The goal is to put this mental state inference engine on a wearable platform and use it to augment or enhance social interactions, said Rana el Kaliouby, a postdoctoral researcher at the Media Lab.

"This is only possible now because of the progress made in affective computing, real-time machine perception and wearable technologies," she said.

The researchers are developing an outward-facing version of the ESP system with a cap-mounted camera connected to a wearable computer. People with autism spectrum disorders have a hard time determining others' emotions or even whether someone is paying attention to them. The system is designed to provide that missing information. --Eric Smalley --Face Reader Bridges Autism Gap (Wired)

My students and I recently read Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, which has a protagonist who is unable to read facial expressions. Now that we're reading The Diamond Age (a cyberpunk bildungsroman about a marvellously advanced educational book), I thought it would be worthwhile to blog this technological innvation as well.

The key word for me here is not 'Fun'. The concept of fun is well understood, I should think, after many years of games and many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of releases. There are theories of fun, analyses of fun, examinations of the fun of one aspect of a game or another, and whole schema devoted to separating out different kinds of fun.

No, the key word for me here is 'meant'. Meaning is an interesting concept, in both positive and negative, because it suggests purpose or exclusion. Saying that a product is meant to be a certain way can implicitly imply that it is not meant to be another way. Big Macs are meant to be tasty pleasures, they are not meant to be nutrition supplements, for example. They are designed with that intent.

What I'm driving at here is a kind of pre-judgment, and video games are unique as a medium (that I'm aware of) in that the greater majority of its creators, designers and producers otherwise actively pre-judge themselves and their work according to a 'fun' standard not as a key trait of enablement, but as the end goal in and of itself. --Tadhg Kelly --''Video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun.'' (Particle Blog)

Via Grand Text Auto.

I liked this author's argument that in video games, "fun" is a means, not an end. Still, this passive-verb-heavy passage prompted me to post a bit about the intentional fallacy:

Novels need to be readable. Their basic craft requires that readers are invited to keep turning the pages until they get to the end. But what are novels 'meant' to be? Nothing. They're meant to be whatever the author intends for them to be. Ditto music, ditto poetry, ditto television, sculpture, comics and so on. In all these forms, the basis of aesthetics or pace or whatever are regarded as the core necessity.

Like most of the faculty on my campus, I typically just use the ELMO as an overhead projector to show handouts, but without having to go through the trouble of making a transparency, since it will project anything you put on it. In my mind, it's even easier to operate than a PowerPoint presentation, and I'll sometimes print out a quick outline for any lecture or class plan (in large font) and just project it, moving as we go through the class outline, keeping the hour organized. But I also like to experiment with the ELMO and see what other things it is capable of doing. After all, people's eyes are naturally drawn to a big screen spectacle and there is a way to tap into this for educational purposes and to reach out to visual learners. These devices are fantastic for visual aids, but I haven't seen professors using them very creatively, let alone with much expertise. It's something worth taking advantage of to not only project information, but to put into action to keep a class' attention (without, of course, using it as a DISTRACTION). --Mike Arnzen
--Tickling the ELMO (Pedablogue)

A great fresh look at a piece of technology I use almost every day.

Publisher sales reps inform Wal-Mart buyers of games in development; the games' subjects, titles, artwork and packaging are vetted and sometimes vetoed by Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart tells a top-end publisher it won't carry a certain game, the publisher kills that game. In short, every triple-A game sold at retail in North America is managed start to finish, top to bottom, with the publisher's gaze fixed squarely on Wal-Mart, and no other. --Allen Varney --Wal-Mart Rules: One Giant Company Controls Your Games -- But How Much Longer? (The Escapist)

This is what happens when games go mainstream -- and when they mean big bucks. There will always be indie games, of course.

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 7 -- Gleaming Translucent Chandeliers, Detail of Railing, Heavy Object Designing (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This week I finally managed to make my chandeliers look decent. Previously I had placed an invisible light-emitting entity inside a solid translucent block, but that unfortunately left the outside edges of the block looking very dark. So this time I created four thin transparent walls, and put the light inside all four walls. In addition, I placed extra light sources outside the chandelier, to create the glowing effect that I wanted.

The picture shows that I also added some chandeliers to the top level of the balcony. You can also see the woodgrain railings, though at this resolution the 45 degree angle join is only barely noticeable.

I actually spent much more time on the room I haven't shown yet. To give meaning to my new media meanderings, I'm trying to create a Half-Life 2 mod that implements Cloak of Darkness, a very simple scenario that's been implemented in dozens of different programming environments. That scenario is set in the lobby of an opera house, and features a bar (which I'm working on) and a cloakroom (that I haven't started yet).

While designing the bar, for the first time I've worked extensively with angled wall shapes -- complicated modular units that I duplicate and rotate in order to form a circle. The circle is divided up into 10 sections, so I created a large 36 degree wedge, then used it to cut out a kind of trough, and then placed my wall unit in the trough, and used the trough to cut the wall unit into a piece that has 36 degree edges. Since the world-building feature isn't designed to work with resolutions of smaller than one inch, the modules I'm creating are going to be a little off, but I'm not too worried.

These wall units are so complex that I should really be creating them in a 3D modeling tool, and importing them as models into the HL2 world. I'm actually being very wasteful of computing resources by constructing these modules out of blocky square brushes, and manipulating the corners of the blocks in order to approximate the shapes I want. But I'm not yet ready to tackle learning a 3D modeling program.

No pictures of that room yet. I need to spend some time creating the images that will make my wall units look better. Half-Life 2 comes with plenty of materials that represent cracking plaster, rubble, bricks, etc. It's also easy to find assorted high-tech panels and display readouts online, but nothing that depicts the precise decor I'm shooting for. So the models look pretty slapdash at the moment.

I'll show photos of the bar area when I've got something worth sharing.

According to the nonprofit Electronic Literature Organization, within the broad category of electronic literature are several forms and threads of practice, including hypertext fiction and poetry, on and off the Web; kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms; computer art installations, which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects; conversational characters, also known as chatterbots; interactive fiction; novels that take the form of e-mails, SMS messages or blogs; poems and stories that are generated by computers, either interactively or based on parameters given at the beginning; collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work; and literary performances online that develop new ways of writing. --Digital writing gives new meaning to a good read (My San Antonio)

Games today are many times more complex than games were even a few years ago. Recreating every three-dimensional point of a complex cave environment is going to take an artist several orders of magnitude more time than dropping a few rough dots on an Atari 2600's 196x160 screen and calling it a cave environment. Similarly, producing a full 5.1 surround sound track for a modern game requires sound engineers and advanced programming libraries. Triggering a few blips and bleeps is much easier.

But there are also some less obvious reasons for longer development cycles. In the old days, a programmer with a text editor and a few programs could create an entire game. However, to create all the complex content and code required for a modern game, programmers and artists need powerful tools such as 3-d modelers and advanced debuggers. Unfortunately, programmers and artists often have to use general purpose tools that are not at all well suited to game development. And when domain-specific tools do exist, such as in console game development, the tools are often unstable and immature due to the short life span of any particular console system. A multi-platform console world further complicates development by multiplying all of the issues of developing for a single platform by the number of platforms on which you intend to deliver your game. --Adam Geitgey --Where are the Good Open Source Games? (OS News)

Great suggestion, Evan.

Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today. People don't use things they don't understand. Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users. Jakob Nielsen --Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First (Alertbox)

Rather than the familiar panels consisting of three 15-20 minute papers, a pitcher of water, and a brief Q&A (time permitting), these meetings were structured as “electronic poster sessions.” Multiple presenters stationed around the perimeter of the room in front of easel displays and laptop computers demonstrated their projects and spoke to anyone who stopped by with questions. --Steven E. Jones --The Significance of Electronic Poster Sessions (Inside Higher Ed)

This scholarly genre is nothing new. I've given several myself, one at a medieval drama convention, and one or two at the 4Cs.

What's significant is that the Modern Language Association is interested in it.

I had high hopes for the Higher Ed Blog Con, which starts today, but both of the first presentations are delivered as downloaded linear files. The first one is an argument for screencasting -- a lecture alternative. I can certainly understand why it would be useful to download a screencast about the value of screencasting, but the other is presented in 2 parts, which together will require almost an hour to watch. Were I actually at the conference, I could spend the time, but since I'm going to have to fit this conference in an already busy week, I don't think I'm going to watch many hour-long linear, old-fashioned presentations. New wine, old wineskins.

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 6 - Switchable Chandeliers, Automatic Sliding Doors, Railings, Carpet (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This was a tremendously productive weekend. After helping two fellow interactive fiction fans finish a proposal for next year's MLA, I tackled a few things I had been meaning to get to for a while.

The first picture shows the much more realistic chandeliers that I managed to create. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but it's good enough for the demo I'm working on now.

While I didn't bother trying to capture it in the screen grab, I've also added a button that turns the chandeliers on and off. The red carpet really ought to be running up the stairs, but I'm not sure I want to tackle that yet. Already, when I do a full compile of this game world, it's taking my little laptop 10 or so minutes. I'm not sure yet what the acronyms on the compile window means, but I fiddled with the settings so that I don't have to do that full compile every time, which saves a lot of time.


I'm particularly proud of the railings in this picture. I didn't take a screen grab, but I figured out how to edit the vertices so that the perfectly rectangular railing pieces join together at 45 degree angles.

The red door also slides open to reveal a room inside. I've got some ideas for that room, but I'm going to save them for now, and show them when the room is in really good shape.

Now that I can interact with the world in simple ways (turning on and off lights, opening doors), it's time to start working with NPCs. I'm thinking first of just telling an NPC to walk to spot B when the PC enters spot A, and then walk to spot C when the PC enters spot B, and so on, with the NPC eventually returning to spot A. Since FacePoser crashes my laptop when I run it at home, I don't know how much luck I'll have working with NPCs, but Half Life 2 comes with a range of pre-set emotions and gestures, so we'll see what I can accomplish.