Design: July 2008 Archive Page

Via Psychemethadelica! (Metafilter)

If you want to label me retrofuturistic so I can fit into your compartmentalized worldview, that's fine. But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle. While many of my kind doubt there'll be a complete societal collapse in the future, a near-cataclysm is likely. In this scenario, I will be able to repair a generator, suture the wounded, and even train carrier pigeons. I'm learning valuable skills. --Marco Kay

Jimmy Maher offers a provocative editorial in the latest issue of the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games newsletter.

Galatea excites admiration, interest, even a certain amount of awe, and all of it richly deserved.  However, it seems to excite very little love.  Nor does it seem to inspire its player to grapple with anything more universal than the design of good IF conversation systems.

Is this a problem?  Not really, I think, when taken in isolation.  I think that Emily Short, whom I have immense respect for as a writer, creator, and tireless agent for positive change in IF, intended her work as an experiment and even possibly a bit of a provocation, an illustration of what might be possible.  But where is the game that takes Galatea's formal and technical innovations and uses them in the service of crackerjack story with a fascinating setting and compelling, believable characters?  Eric Eve's recent works come close, but how many others do?  Galatea sits out there in splendid isolation.  People play it, they tell themselves and each other how interesting it was, what potential for IF it demonstrates, and then they move on.  It's not up to Emily to build on Galatea's foundation; if she retires from IF tomorrow, she's done more for the form than I or 99% of you will ever manage.  It's up to us.  Where are we?

Some of us who are very, very good are writing games like the generally acknowledged best game of 2007: Lost Pig.  On the one hand, Lost Pig is nothing to disparage.  It's hilarious; it's great fun; it's honed and polished to the most beautiful shine.  Admiral Jota deserves tons of praise and respect for his creation.

Also of note, A Blind Man's Take on Interactive Fiction:

Most gaming opens worlds for people. Interacting with characters and role-playing a career or life that they do not have in the real world allows people to imagine themselves in certain situations, or challenges the person to make certain decisions.  It is that aspect of gaming, along with the writing,  descriptions of scenes and the possibility of interacting with characters that make interactive fiction so special. As a blind person, most mainstream role-playing games are unplayable. Interactive fiction is then the bridge that allows me as a blind person, who also would like to participate in the joys of relaxing with a role-playing computer game, to step into an imaginary world.

Steampunk is one of my guilty pleasures... I think of it more of an asthetic than a literary movement, and I own neither a pair of aviator goggles nor a wind-up pocketwatch. Nevertheless, it happens that at this moment in another window I'm rendering a 3D view of an brass-and-glass spaceship ethership that features in the steampunk bedtime stories I've been telling my kids ever since I saw the last name "Gearhart" in a student roster.  Randy Nakamura sounds a little mystified by the popularity of the steampunk style, though he does a fair job exposing its sillier excesses.

[A]s Peter Berbergal of the Boston Globe notes, "In all of the new Steampunk design there is a strong nostalgia for a time when technology was mysterious and yet had a real mark of the craftsperson burnished into it." Never mind the fact that the Victorian era was a time of demystification: Darwin's theory of natural selection upset centuries of received religious knowledge about human origins, and the mechanization of virtually everything meant you could produce objects, designs and books ten or twenty times faster and distribute them to the very ends of the earth. As Philip Meggs, commenting on the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, has succinctly put it: "Handicraft almost completely vanished. The unity of design and production ended." The world had suddenly become smaller. If Steampunkers are looking to the past for some sort of inspired return to a prior era, then they are running in slack parallel with their ancestors. The Victorians were cultural raiders without peer. Rococo, Tudor, Gothic Revival and the umpteenth generation of Neo-Neo-Classicism were not enough. They went abroad to bring back the ill-gotten gains of their imperial aesthetic loot. Moorish ornaments, Ukiyo-e, Chinese porcelain, hieroglyphics all found their way into Victorian eclecticism. Form before concept.

From the L Magazine. Some are actually just unfortunate art, but the whole list was worth it for this one:

In addition to the usage error, I particularly like how the highlights on the drops of blood seem to be made by a light shining *up* from the lower right.

Okay, and this next one is almost certainly a quadruple play:

On a listserv of which I'm a member, Jerome McDonough points out that Tennis for Two is an analog game, so not only does it not require a computer, the medium itself -- an oscilloscope -- is an analog, so the information being represented on the screen isn't digital at all.  An even earlier game, and the first game to use digital graphics, is Noughts and Crosses (1952).

This page lists the source code for the world[']s first computer game and incidentally the world[']s first computer based version of noughts and crosses (tic tac toe).

This is the original source code written by A.S. Douglas that was loaded from a punched paper tape and run on the EDSAC machine. It is written in an assembler. even for those of us who are unfamiliar with the EDSAC instruction set and it's assembly language some parts of the code look reasonably comprehensible. The most impressive feature is it's length - this very short piece of code manages a good game of noughts and crosses.

Keen to find out more? Then download the EDSAC simulator and the documentation from www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/ You can then follow this algorithm or try your hand at programming the worlds first programmable computer.

Every year, the Army recruits, at great expense, tens of thousands of young men and women. Given the costs of recruitment (and the dearth of eligible recruits), the Army cannot afford to lose many of these new soldiers. Army training is designed to take recruits who may know nothing about military life, discipline, or maneuvers, and mold them into warriors. Likewise, my task is to mold nascent scholars out of the under-performing, ill-prepared students who frequently show up in my community college classroom. I've found three Army practices most useful: making expectations explicit, the "crawl-walk-run" methodology, and formal evaluation of training. --Martha Kinney

The military has a fairly simple evaluation scale -- "go" or "no go."  In practice, that means means "success" or "do it again."  When I teach writing for the internet, one sequence of assignments culminates in the students having to create a website (a series of interconnected web pages with appropriately credited images) according to my specifications, in the space of a single class period. I gave very general guidelines -- "A client who loves the color green and who is obsessed with cheese."  Obviously the point of that exercise is not polished prose, but rather a knowledge of the HTML-authoring tools, CSS, filepaths, and basic online courtesy (giving credit where credit is due).

A student in my basic composition class who misplaces a quotation mark can still get partial credit, since I can still read the rest of the paragraph despite the technical error. But a student who misplaces a quotation mark when creating a hyperlink might create a technical error that prevents users from getting to the rest of the site's content.  So I recognize the need to walk students through the whole process carefully, even though I typically get at least a few students who are already accomplished web authors, who might find this process tedious. (I'll have to let them start working ahead if they do well on the authoring exercise.)

I'm glad Kinney acknowledged that the army teaching model is not designed to foster creativity, but there are certain basic skills --not just HTML authorship but also peer-critiquing, close reading, and literary critical analysis -- that have a technical component with very specific requirements. Students who haven't mastered those technical requirements can be extremely frustrated when they notice their end result doesn't meet the advanced requirements (where creativity is more important).

Modern recreation of the 1958 video game "Tennis for Two" (Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)

If the following line doesn't get you reading The Steampunk Home, nothing will:

I can think of two steampunk references to octopodes.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Google's version of Second Life, as explained for the benefit of an audience that isn't expected to know anything about virtual worlds (NYT).

Google unveiled the new product in a post on its official blog -- its characteristically understated way of introducing new features to the world. It can be reached at www.lively.com but is officially part of Google Labs, an area of the company's site where it showcases projects that remain in the beta, or experimental, phase.

Lively and similar products from other companies have the potential to change the way people interact over the Web. Online chat rooms are two-dimensional -- they include text, and sometimes voice and video.

Lively tries to make that conversation three-dimensional, more interactive and more fun. As if they were playing a game, users choose from a selection of unrealistically handsome or Disneyesque avatars. They can also create their own rooms, which can be posted to a blog or social network profile as easily as a YouTube video.

Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one another. (Text appears as cartoon-style bubbles atop the avatars.) Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa, Google's photo service, as if they were pieces of art.

This Wired article also mentions the Canadian Roberts variation. When I was living in Canada, I remember being annoyed at having to buy special screwdrivers for furniture that I bought there.  I actually came across a set of Roberts power tool heads that someone had thrown into a gutter. True story. 

The Phillips screw and screwdriver were patented this day in 1936.
Courtesy U.S Patent and Trademark Office

1936: Henry F. Phillips receives patents for a new kind of screw and the new screwdriver needed to make it work. It changes the worlds of mass production and machine repair, not to mention your home toolbox. (Randy Alfred, Wired)

Other, screw-related blog entries:

• Unscrewed: Finding Replacement Screws for Palm Tungsten T3
• What is Uni-Screw? - Jerz's Literacy Weblog
• The standardization of screws

I just saw Wall-E with the family. It's rare for me to suggest that we all go see a movie -- my wife is the cinema buff. But I had read outstanding reviews, and it is a Pixar film, so I went in with high expectations, and was satisfied. It didn't knock my socks off; the "Daddy, is he really dead?" ending was predictable -- I think the death of a supporting character was probably necessary to boost the emotional energy, but I did like the supporting cast of malfunctioning robots (I wanted them to have more screen time).  But those are quibbles.

For bedtime reading, my son and I are going through How to Survive a Robot Uprising, and I just taught him about the uncanny valley last night. So it was interesting to see how human the robots seemed in this film, and how artificial the humans seemed (though that's a design choice that fits well with the story). In the New York Times, Frank Rich writes a thoughtful review of Wall-E:

This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex's walls.

While the real-life grown-ups on TV were again rebooting Vietnam, the kids at "Wall-E" were in deep contemplation of a world in peril -- and of the future that is theirs to make what they will of it. Compare any 10 minutes of the movie with 10 minutes of any cable-news channel, and you'll soon be asking: Exactly who are the adults in our country and who are the cartoon characters?

Almost any description of this beautiful film makes it sound juvenile or didactic, and it is neither. So I'll keep to the minimum. "Wall-E" is a robot-meets-robot love story, as simple (and often as silent) as a Keaton or Chaplin fable, set largely in a smoldering and abandoned Earth, circa 2700, where the only remaining signs of life are a cockroach and a single green sprout.

The robot of the title is a battered mobile trash compactor whose sole knowledge of human civilization and intimacy comes from the avalanche of detritus the former inhabitants left behind -- a Rubik's Cube, an engagement ring and, most strangely, a single stuttering VCR tape of "Hello, Dolly!," a candied Hollywood musical from 1969. Wall-E keeps rewinding to the song that finds the young lovers pledging their devotion until "time runs out."

Pixar is not Stanley Kubrick. Though "Wall-E" is laced with visual and musical allusions to "2001: A Space Odyssey," its vision of apocalypse now is not as dark as Kubrick's then. The new film speaks to the anxieties of 2008 as specifically as "2001" did to the more explosive tumult of its (election) year, 1968. That's more than upsetting enough.

Active verbs form more efficient and more powerful sentences than passive verbs. This document will teach you why and how to prefer active verbs. (Active and Passive Verbs)

I'm slowly rolling out a new template for my online handouts.

For years, I've been using Dreamweaver to manage my academic website, but I don't have a copy of the program on my laptop, so I can only update my handouts when I'm in the office. Plus, now that MovableType is open source, I'd like to use it.

I love the idea of letting visitors post comments to my handouts, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to keep all the URLs. the same.  MT automatically removes dashes and underscores when it creates URLs, and all my index files are index.html (rather than .htm). I'm sure there's a way to use .htaccess to solve the problem with redirects, but I ran into a brick wall.

It's been several years since I attempted a redesign of my curricular website, which holds trusty old handouts, some of which I tweak on a regular basis, and some of which I haven't touched in years. I've been thinking a lot about navigation and layout, especially now that most people's computer monitors have fairly high resolution, and the growing number of widescreen monitors is opening up some space on the right-hand side of my web pages, which I hadn't previously been using.  I've already put a "recent related entries" feature on the individual blog entry pages (the system selects those automatically based on category... it's not perfect, becuase it doesn't weight more heavily an entry that shares three cateogries as more similar to an entry that just shares one category with the current entry, but it's better than nouthing). 

I was reading a Washington Times article on the press coverage of Obama's doings, when I noticed this widget.

As one would guess from the triangle over on the right, when you click on the headline, a box opens up.  But if you see an open box, and you want to visit the article on the other side of the link, if you do what comes naturally -- clicking the title -- what happens is the window closes up. You have to click it again to open it, then click on the tiny word "view >".  (I don't want to "view" it... I want to "read" it! But that's beside the point.)

To my mind, the collapsing menu thing is done better at the Evening Standard, where the panels will glide open when you hover the mouse pointer over the title. (Horrors! I just checked, and the mouse-over menu at the Evening Standard doesn't appear to be working anymore.)

Beyond balancing difficulty is the simple question of whether it serves any purpose in the game at all. Back at the Pickford blog, another article goes into the various game design options that let a player break down the difficulty at their own pace. Although these games still utilize difficulty to a certain extent, there is always a way out. In some games, you can just level grind until your characters can overpower a boss. Interactive fiction or puzzles rarely maintain their difficulty because you can always check for hints online. The origin of such accommodations in these games was to make sure that someone who enjoyed the plot would always be able to get to the end. After all, as Pickford notes, when you're telling a story, getting to the conclusion is the reward, not overcoming a tricky boss fight. -- L.B. Jeffries (Moving Pixels)