small world on ipad

Been slowing increasing in envy for FP's iPad.  To be perfectly honest, I probably won't get one for years (after they're gone through 3 generations and it's already being replaced by something cooler), but I'm starting to appreciate its versatility.  Not surprisingly, much of the power of the iPad comes from the burgeoning family of available Apps.

I am especially enthusiastic about the possibility of playing boardgames on an iPad.  The other night, FP and I played a couple games of Small World, for 2 player on his iPad.  It was exquisite.  I mean, I love boardgames - so I sort of missed the feel of the pieces, and the process of the set-up, but the fact of the matter is that the team of engineers who ported this game over to the iPad did a fantastic job.  We scanned the Quick Rules, and decided to throw caution to the wind and just try a game.  Because the iPad enforces the movement and attack rules, we were able to learn through trial-and-error - much faster than constantly referring to a rule book to make sure we didn't do something wrong.

 We were able to whip through 2 games in under an hour.  It played without a glitch.  And they are still working on improving things - the current release is 0.91. 

After just this brief stint, I started daydreaming about having an iPad with a vast boardgame collection on it.  Neuroshima Hex.  Memoir '44. Attika.  Carcasonne.  Drakon.  Ghost Stories (for solitaire play).  Nexus Ops.  Not everything would work, of course.  iPad boardgames should probably be solitaire or 2-player only and not require too much table space.  As much as I'd like to be able to play Arkham Horror on an iPad, I just can't see how that could happen with all the components, cards, text, tokens, etc.

But the iPad is calling out for other relatively simple 2-player wargames.  I'd love to be able to drop my iPad in front of my brother, while on vacation, and pull up a dozen or so solid boardgames for us to play.  Days of Wonder has started the trend - here's hoping the rest of the gaming world gets on board (get it?).

social gaming

Not surprisingly, for the past several months there has been a lot of buzz in the tech world over "social gaming."  FarmVille, for example, potentially has over 80 million active users on Facebook.  Zynga, the online gaming company that markets FarmVille, generated revenues of over $150 million this year. At the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, social gaming was a central topic of discussion - and more than a few independent game developers were offended by having their creative products compared to the FarmVilles and Mafia Wars of the world.

you're kidding me, right?  this is popular?

Soren Johnson, the lead designer for Civilization IV and a highly intelligent and astute game designer, offers the following thoughts on social gaming:  "Fear and Loathing in Farmville."

It's a good read, for a number of reasons.  One of Johnson's biggest fears is that social gaming removes too much creative power from the designer, and places it either in the hands of a "suit" (more concerned with maximizing the bottom-line versus entertainment value) or the player-base.  This latter point is interesting.  Reiterative design, whereby the structure of a game is steadily and rapidly changed based on player feedback, has the potential to be a powerful force in shaping games to suit players' entertainment desires.  But it also caters to the lowest common denominator, and it makes the concept of a "game designer" (someone with a special creative talent in game design) less meaningful.

To quote:

I have to admit my own reservations about this transformation; game design itself simply might be not as much fun as it used to be. I cannot easily sum up how enjoyable brainstorming a game is during the early, heady days of blue skies and distant deadlines. With a release-early-and-iterate mentality, these days are now over, for good. Games will no longer be a manifestation of an individual’s (or a team’s) pure imagination and, instead, will grow out of the murky grey area between developers and players. The designer-as-auteur ideal is perhaps incompatible with this model, but I believe the best game designers are the ones willing to “get dirty” – to engage fully with a community to discover which ideas actually work and which ones were simply wishful thinking. Loss of control is never fun, but as Sid is fond of saying, the player should be the one having the fun, after all, not the designer.

Most gamers' and designers' primary concern with social gaming, as it stands now, is how these products are built, from the ground up, to abuse and exploit the customer.  Social games typically utilize a partial reinforcement schedule to keep players coming back, much like slot machines in casinos.  The hope of the company is that their customer will become behaviorally addicted to the product and a regular subscriber.  If they can cajole/convince their friends to sign up too, their experience will improve (for example, they might receive some bonus content).  It is also common to sabotage the functionality of the product, requiring payment to improve performance, open up options which are usually standard, etc.

Now, there's a danger here of over-reaction.  After all, these games are free to play.  If you're careful, they are free to play forever.  Ultimately, it is your choice whether you want to invest any money in furthering your gaming experience.  The business model demands that there be some mechanism of generating revenue to cover the cost of development and distribution of a free-to-play model.  Advertising is one possibility.  Micro-transactions is another.  In and of themselves, there are not necessarily evil things (well, maybe advertising is, but not micro-transactions).

Furthermore, there is definitely something to be gleaned from the popularity of these games.  Johnson delineates 4 attributes of social games that "promise great things for both gamers and designers":

• True friends list: Gaming can now happen exclusively within the context of one’s actual friends. Multiplayer games no longer suffer from the Catch-22 of requiring friends to be fun while new players always start the game without friends.
• Free-to-play business model: New players need not shell out $60 to join the crowd. Consumers don’t like buying multiplayer games unless they know that their friends are all going to buy the game as well. Free-to-play removes that friction.
• Persistent, asynchronous play: Finding time to play with one’s real friends is difficult, especially for working, adult gamers. Asynchronous mechanics, however, let gamers play at their own pace and with their own friends, not strangers who happen to be online at the same time.
• Metrics-based iteration: Retail games are developed in a vacuum, with designers working by gut instinct. Further, games get only one launch, a single chance to succeed. Most developers would love, instead, to iterate quickly on genuine, live feedback.

And when viewed in this context, one can certainly begin to see why everyone's buzzing about the potential of social gaming - and not just as a money-generating cash-cow, which it surely is.  In particular, #3 (persistent, asynchronous play) appeals to me.  As one grows older and accumulates more life responsibilities, it becomes harder and harder to justify (although I remain capable of doing so) spending 3 hours straight in front of the computer playing with pixels and polygons.  But what if those 3 hours were distributed across a week, in 10-15 minute bites, and you were still able to get a fulfilling strategic gaming experience?  As a related model, consider how much time/energy/enjoyment people get from "playing" fantasy football and its ilk, which are based upon persistent, asynchronous, social interaction.

Personally, I've never been attracted to casual social games because stuff that appeals to the lowest common denominator is likely to be uninteresting to my refined and spoiled palate (snooty, I know).  After all, I've been a gamer for near-on 30 years and I'm particularly drawn to niche markets that don't have mass appeal.  Furthermore, I'm used to playing my games with complete strangers online - and in some ways, I prefer that.  But I can read the tea leaves as well as anyone else, and the fact of the matter is that when it comes to the bottom line, I'm less relevant to the CEO's and business graduates of the world than the ~400 million Facebook users who aren't willing to slap down $50 for the latest and greatest in video-game technowizardry.

I'm not going to play Chicken Little here and say the sky is falling, but casual games, and especially social games, are going to have a major impact of what video games 10 years from now look like.  And it might not necessarily be all bad.

Although if you want to scare yourself, watch this video from DICE 2010, where Carnegie Mellon University professor, Jesse Schell, tries to give us a glimpse into our awesome future.  He's not a great speaker, but it gets very interesting (in a "holy shit, I need to kill myself now" way) around the 20 min mark.

http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/

internet university

I've been meaning to post some of these links for a while... The internet is a fabulous, horrifying thing, alternatively disgusting, provocative, entertaining, and informative.  For the moment, let's ignore all the other bollocks and focus on "informative."

Let's say it's been a while since college, or maybe you never went (or, like me, you're just curious to see  how other professors "do it"), but you're self-motivated to do some learning/thinking on your own.  You can now find free university course content from some of the top researchers and lecturers in the world on the internet.  If audio is enough for you - perhaps you just want to listen to a Harvard professor pontificate about Shakespeare on your Ipod while you go for a morning stroll - they try out iTunesU.

Personally, I found it too distancing.  I think it's overly optimistic of me to presume that I can clean the house or exercise while simultaneously paying attention to Robert Sapolsky.

Instead, I think that Academic Earth has more potential.  Here, you'll get video feed of the lecture as well as audio.  So, minimally, you'll be able to see the professor in question.  Unfortunately, they still haven't solved the problem of how to nicely synch-up lecture slides with audio presentation (a certainly jump-able hurdle).  Sometimes, the videographer completely ignores the slides which make science lectures, in particular, nearly incomprehensible.

If the stodginess of Academic Earth is too much for you, you can also try a couple of other websites that offer more intimate and, periodically, controversial snippets from so-called experts.  Both Big Think and FORA.tv offer interviews and speeches from prominent members of the world community, on all number of topics.

Big Think features direct interviews conducted by Big Think staffers.  For example, here's Helen Fisher, whose theories on romance, sexual attraction, love and lust play a role in some of the research I conduct:



FORA.tv, in contrast, typically posts speeches and interviews captured in other contexts.  The pieces can be unsatisfyingly short, which I think is catering to the presumed short attention span of their internet audience.  For example, a male beaver's lament:



Go forth and nerdify yourself!

know your meme

The only thing I maybe like more than internet memes is the "scientification" of them, such that they are transformed into post-hip objects of analysis.  For example:  explain Advice Dog to your mother and you have participated in the un-cooling of an internet meme.  Fun!  Web-nerds are very possessive about their memes, so if they suspect them of being "exploited" in some fashion, they'll typically respond with hilariously absurd and inappropriate outrage.

As such, I love this site:  Know Your Meme.  If you're just not spending enough time on the internet to know about Ninjas vs. Pirates (and RealUltimatePower), then visit here and absorb the data kindly collected by the fine folks at the Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies.  Or if you prefer the sublime laziness of video...



If the topic intrigues you, you might also want to check out this article from the latest Wired, on Ben Huh, the founder of LolCats, FAIL Blog, GraphJam, and more.  Perhaps more than anyone else, he has exploited internet memes for his own profit and selfishness, making "FAIL" usage so widespread that it makes you want to stab yourself with a pencil.  But, of course, I love it.  "Fashionable" memes spread until they become so popular that they're unpopular.  "Oh, you know about that too?  Well, I guess that Keyboard Cat is lame now."  How awesomely pretentious.  The internet has sparked a unique (and yet so played out) manifestation of the cool contest, perhaps best exemplified by the music nerds of yesteryear ("Oh, you know about King Missile?  Well, I guess they suck now.").  There's nothing more satisfying, perhaps, than watching the hipsters squirm as their fashion sense and musical taste, and now internet knowledge, are co-opted by the Oprah Winfreys of the world.

tv tropes

Spent a good hour or so this morning thoroughly enjoying TV Tropes. A web-wiki written in a (dare I say) refreshingly casual style, on all manner of narrative conventions that tend to define our modern age entertainment products. While at first glance, you might think that a perusal of TV Tropes will only fill you with a deeper sense of cynicism and repugnance at the industry status quo - further reading may allow you to appreciate the archetypal aspects of tropes, and how they serve as brutally efficient but necessary mirrors of our own absurd nature.

Hot Librarian is a fun place to start, and be aware that the joy is in the examples, especially esoteric ones from the late '80's that few (but you) remember. "Theora in Max Headroom." Ha! I remember.

Hot Scientist (not to be confused with Horny Scientist) is also amusing:

"Incidentally, the character that caused a few things to gel in this troper's head and inspire me to put this trope in the wiki in the first place was "Dr." Cataline Stone in the film Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, a film of such constant, royal stupidity that "the day would quake to look on."

I do not know this "Megalodon"... yet.

Just going through the list of Plot tropes may dizzy you.

• Anticlimactic Parent
• Badass in Distress
• Captured Super Entity
• Doorstop Baby
• Faustian Rebellion
• Inadequate Inheritor
• Macho Disaster Expedition

And so on. I suspect we all could place at least one TV episode/film into every one of these categories with just a little thought.

"Science is Useless" caught my eye:

"In a competition of science and technology versus simple hard work, science and technology will almost invariably lose. See, science finds an easier, faster way to achieve something and is therefore cheating and far less honorable than honest sweat and effort. Thus, no matter how much a scientist researches, experiments and innovates, he will never achieve what someone else can with good old practice and hard work.

This trope works because 1) hardly anyone in the audience knows much about science, and 2) people are always eager to believe that anything they don't understand couldn't possibly be important....

...Very much related to Dumb Is Good and Rock Beats Laser. Might somehow be related to Reed Richards Is Useless. See also the physical equivalents Technician Versus Performer (where The Gift overcomes intense training) and Good Old Fisticuffs (where simple fists beats flashy kicks).

Further, there are two different flavors of this trope. If the point is to stress the importance of hard work, then the technological/scientific opponent is presented as an intimidating Goliath that the plucky underdog must struggle to overcome... But if the point is, instead, to deride technology or science as unworthy of human effort and manly men, the opponent is presented as a total joke and the hard worker wins easily. A Straw Man propaganda story. Also, what this trope consistently forgets is that science is hard work, requiring considerable intelligence, as well as lengthy and difficult procedures to create anything useful. Yet rarely or never the hard work of the science-user is shown or screen in relation to the plain old guts."

(BTW - The Reed Richards is Useless entry is amazing.)

I also enjoy the amusing connections between tropes that the contributors have attempted to integrate whenever possible.

From Attack of the Killer Whatevers: "A caveat: if it's a killer animal, there's about a 70% chance that it'll also be giant. If it grows too large, it becomes Attack Of The 50 Foot Whatever."













Worth browsing.

pixel city

This is quite lovely. Simon Parker (whose blog, Chewing Pixels, is fun reading if you're into games and such) has created a procedural city-generator. Here's a video, coming soon to a screensaver near you...



If the math/programming of this intrigues you, here's an extensive developer-diary to quench your curiosity.

lolcat

I don't know why I find them funny but I do. Really, it's beyond whether lolcats are humorous - it's the principle. Lolcat is but one aspect of this wacky, crazy interweb I love so very much. I like pondering why certain internet memes take off, what they say about the American collective unconscious. What is it about lolcat that made it such a phenomenon? Why did this particular absurdity catch on? If you have the answers, I need to know.

In case you're clueless about such virtual nonsense (and that's perfectly reasonable, mind you), I suggest a quick glance at the Wikipedia entry for lolcat. Here's a brief excerpt with the relevant info:

"A lolcat is an image combining a photograph, most frequently of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English—a dialect which is known as “lolspeak,” ”kitteh,” or “kitty pidgin” and which parodies the poor grammar typically attributed to Internet slang. The name "lolcat" is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation "LOL" and the word "cat." A synonym for "lolcat" is cat macro, since the images are a type of image macro. Lolcats are designed for photo sharing imageboards and other internet forums."

Apparently, it all started on on image-board, 4chan.org, where users started posting "cat macros" sometimes involving immoral and disturbing acts. Very nerd-core, if you will. But lolcat first hit the public eye with this G-rated guy, circa 2007:

I know. It's not funny. Maybe it's cute, if you're a cat kinda person, but it's definitely not funny.

Then there was this one, which is a bit funnier and certainly more uncomfortable:

Now note that "Ceiling cat" doesn't make use of the kitty pidgin which I love so dearly.

If you google search, you'll find 1000's, possibly millions, of these images. They used to pop up in the most annoying places, like message boards and comment lists, but nowadays seem to cluster on web-sites dedicated to the phenomenon: like the appropriately named icanhascheezburger.com and lolcats.com. However, picking through lolcats on these sites really demeans the experience - I find lolcat much more powerful and affecting when I encounter one randomly, in a place I otherwise wouldn't expect. Like when I was doing a google search the other day for "Force Field" and got this image:

I copy and collect ones I encounter that amuse me. They don't do much for anyone else, I suspect, but I'm bored today and decided it might lessen my boredom by boring whomever visits this blog.



Here's one that our friend LS found a little while ago and has been making the virtual rounds:

This is pretty brilliant. I mean, it's offensive, cute, horrific, and modern all in one. Well done.

Some are self-referential and angry, which is cool in a post-modern, cynical kind of way:


Here's one that I would call "uber-nerdy": it combines lolcat, esoteric video game knowledge, and The Settlers of Catan boardgame. Holy fuck, I'm embarrassed.


Then there's this one, which was inevitable...

And just so you get a taste of the range of possibilities, some people really break from the whole "cat" thing and have taken this meme in other directions.


Again, I don't know why but the very idea of combining lolcat with Cthulhu is just funny to me.

Finally, you should probably check out the Lolcat Bible Translation Project, where community users are attempting to translate every book, chapter and verse of the bible into lol-speak. Here's how it begins - Genesis 1:

"1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.
2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.
3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.
4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.
5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1
6 An Ceiling Cat sayed, im in ur waterz makin a ceiling. But he no yet make a ur. An he maded a hole in teh Ceiling.
7 An Ceiling Cat doed teh skiez with waterz down An waterz up. It happen.
8 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has teh firmmint wich iz funny bibel naim 4 ceiling, so wuz teh twoth day."

If you read further, you'll eventually encounter "Basement Cat." Yes, annoying and pointless. But also awesome. Really, if we can't celebrate this kind of human endeavor, aren't we missing out on a whole aspect of artistic creation and time-wasting that begs for analysis?

twist

It remains to be seen whether Twitter is simply another passing tech-fad, the ultimate voyeuristic experiment, or a herald of something far more disturbing to come. Clearly, it's the height of obsessive narcissism and a cry out for social comfort in the deafening loneliness of our time - oh wait, that's blogging. Regardless, I'm not one to care much about people's micro-updates ("I'm taking a crap!" "I'm eating a burrito!" "I'm having sex with your girlfriend!") on an individual level, but once you start letting me compile data from thousands of cyberhipsters (did I just coin that term?) I might start thinking Twitter is a scientific tool.

Twist (or Twitter Trends) allows you to see the % of twitters that mention particular words over the course of a week or month. So, for example, if you type in "Darwin," you'll see a peak (nearly 1% of twitters) yesterday around 10:00am. Boring.

I'm more curious about cursing frequency. So, for kicks, I put in "fuck," "shit," and "cat" (my control group). These are the data:

(click for larger image)

So there's clearly a circadian pattern in use of both fuck and shit. The vertical gray lines represent midnight, so the daily peaks for these two words occur around midnight or soon thereafter (I am assuming that these times are "local" to the person tweeting). Also, the weekly peak for "fuck" and "shit" occurs right around midnight between Sunday and Monday. Why don't I find that surprising.

Twist also lets you see some of the Tweets it's sampling. Here are some examples from my experiment for you to ponder and contemplate:

"my roommates show up with groceries and start cooking lunch as soon as i start recording. fuck the kitchen. i wish i still lived alone"

"So angry, gonna punch a cat inna mouf. Fuck yeah."
(this one contributed to 2 of my trends - amazing!)

"When one of these rap niggas finally kills another rap nigga, I'm going to be RIGHT THERE to say, 'I AINT SEE SHIT.'" (Damn!)

"When you install an Adobe product, they really put so much shit on your computer you don't want."

True that.