Ada Lovelace Day: Teachers

I've long been an admirer of the remarkable Ada Lovelace but it wasn't until three days ago that I learned she's inspired a day of blogging about women in technology. Unfortunately the fanfic that I have been composing in my mind for the last few years is not ready for publication (maybe next year?); also, I'm having trouble simply choosing ONE woman to write about since I know so many whom I admire.

I've been really lucky, knowing such talented women who haven't taken "no" for an answer or let cultural expectations get in the way of what they wanted to do. Many of you probably know them too. But I want to write about three awesome teachers I had who aren't famous; they didn't start companies; they didn't wind up on "Most Influential" lists; but they dedicated so much of their time to teaching kids math and science.

For seventh and eighth grade my math teacher was Tina Kolpakowski. She was awesome. She was a tall, lean hippie chick, 24 years old (fresh out of grad school!) who wore tie dye and listened to the Grateful Dead. She had us call her "Tina." She made me a mix tape once because she said I needed to listen to more Bob Dylan. She also took a few of us on a field trip to see the Dead perform at the Greek Theater in Berkeley.

She was just so cool and open-minded. She put me in the "advanced" math class which was a shock to me at the time since I always thought I was "bad at math." She helped me see that I really wasn't, that math was just another way of understanding the universe. She made me understand that math could be trippy and psychedelic and exciting and that you could both be a mathematician AND still love to do Tarot card readings.

In high school I had a brilliant teacher for calculus, Dr. Munro. I never knew her first name... she was always just "Dr. Munro." She was the polar opposite of Tina in many ways -- she was Scottish, reserved, of a generation that always had their hair just so, their stockings straight, their prim blouses buttoned up. She was a hard teacher -- she once threw an eraser at a student who wasn't paying attention in class -- but she was fair. I admit that I was intimidated by her, but in a way that made me admire her more. I nearly flunked her class but she did her best to prepare me for the AP exams and I'm stunned to this day that I passed with the highest possible score. I assure you, the accomplishment is not mine to claim, but belongs to Dr. Munro's tireless efforts.

Carol Stanton was the physics teacher at my high school and I think she still is. At the time I went there she was also young -- maybe 24? -- and we were her first class. I was, at the time, a moody and reluctant who had decided that physics was not really my thing. Carol pushed us to think about physics in real-world terms and understand how theory applied to life, making us do a number of experiments that required us to build things, run around the campus and measure things, and sometimes make a mess in the lab.

I remember one time when I was just not getting a concept -- I don't remember what the problem was. She sat next to me. "Ok... what's the formula?" she asked gently but persistently. Step by step she walked me through it. I felt a bit stupid then for being so recalcitrant before. If she was so willing to extend a hand, why was I so bent on rejecting it? Little by little I unwound in her class. I won't claim to have ever been a good student in physics -- I don't think I even dared to take the AP exam -- but she did dispel the fear of the unknown, of trying something new, of attempting something even if I thought I was going to fail.

Tina, Carol, and Dr. Munro, I hope you knew how much I appreciated you, even though I did a poor job of conveying that to you at the time. Thank you!

Virtual D&D

I can't tell, honestly, if this is going to be cool or really, really UNcool.

...And yes, I know that it's already uncool. You know what I mean.

The Internets Actually Broke Today

Except, it was real, and it was caused by power fluctuations in San Francisco. The power in my office went out six or seven times. Fun! Gaming sites and high tech sites went down, too.

I should have worked from home today....

An Inelegant Solution

Back at the second-ever World Cyber Games there was a talk during one of the Business Conference panels by some Microsoft reps, who were excited about bringing the Xbox to South Korea. They talked about bringing South Korea's official pasttime, Starcraft, to the Xbox. Then one (Korean) audience member asked, "But will you have a keyboard?"

The speaker - I wish I could remember who it was, it was a product manager from the Xbox group - shook his head definitively. "No, no keyboards. The console is for the living room. Computers and keyboards are for a different space."

"But," the questioner went on dubiously, "we are used to playing RTS with keyboards. How will we play without a keyboard?"

The Microsoft rep merely repeated, "We will never bring keyboards to a living room console."

Well, times change - and now we've reached the era when the distinction between locations and behaviors is really fuzzy. People *do* text in their living rooms, and they entertain themselves on their phones, and they watch movies on their PCs. So bringing a keyboard to a console doesn't sound as crazy as when Dreamcast did it (a console so ahead of its time in so many ways!) or when the Gamecube did. Anyone who has painfully tried to send a text message through xbox live using a controller will understand why Microsoft is releasing something like this. The only problem is, it is goofy. I mean, if this had appeared on any other website than Gamasutra I would have assumed it was a hoax.

But the new Live update and this peripheral is a sign that Microsoft is progressing on putting all their pieces together. The fact that the Xbox had to be modded to be fully functional - because Microsoft was so set on keeping it hard-coded to the "living room" - was fixed with Xbox 360, which has the best features of media sharing built in. And now they've added multiplatform support, further blurring the lines. It's certainly the way of the future - interconnect nodes of content accessibility and communication, all tied to a single user profile.

That said, it's goofy; it's an inelegant solution. Is there a better one? I'm not sure. I'll have to test this model out to see how it really functions in the context of gaming.

3-D Level Design Now

A couple of days ago we checked out the new multiplayer levels from Splinter Cell: Double Agent and what struck me right away was how three-dimensional the levels are - so much so that each space looks entirely different if you play as a Merc or as a Spy. There's a sophistication in level design these days even for the humble FPS that takes into account such a great deal of vertical space that levels feel that much more vast and explorable. It's almost like we've defined a new sort of third dimension - maybe dimension 3.1.

It's not like this is totally new. Alien VS. Predator offered a similar shifting of venues as the player shifted avatars, leading to completely different game experiences in a shared space. It's all about how the player experiences the space, and that, it turns out, is a very powerful mechanic.

Check it out - the mercs view (on the left) looks like standard FPS; the spies view (on right) looks like third-person stealth. See how different the same area looks in the pairs of shots.

Boss House

Dawn Waves

You can also see it in motion here:

Ruminations on the Revolution

Danc over at the Lost Garden blog has a great navel-gazer of an article on the topic of Nintendo's next-gen offering.

Development After Retail
E3 has come and passed, delighting those who were required to cover the event, as it signals the start of the slightly slower-paced gaming season that precedes the holiday rush. Say what you will about the quality of the products on display this year -- it seems many came away from the event feeling slightly underwhelmed -- but there were definitely a few reasons to make the trek to Los Angeles last week.

TOMONOBU ITAGAKI.

I was lucky enough to be invited to a relatively small party hosted by Tecmo and Team Ninja celebrating the end of a Dead or Alive Ultimate online tournament. The top eight players from around the world were in attendance to compete against each other for the top spot and a chance to meet the game's illustrious and often misunderstood creator, Tomonobu Itagaki.

I was delighted by the diversity of the players in attendance; they had come from not only the US and Japan, but also New Zealand, Taiwan, and Mexico. While most players were young men, the crowd favorite was clearly the middle-aged Japanese woman who had made her way through the ranks to take on the world's other top players. Watching them play was impressive; many disregard DOA due to its deceptively simplistic fighting mechanics. But watching skilled players -- the world's best, in fact -- does make it much easier to respect the game. No button masher would've stood a chance in that room.

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Xbox Power Cord Recall

Posted purely as a public service for the safety of GGA readers worldwide. New, safer cords for the asking. Get 'em while they're... um... not hot.

Money Magazine Online story.

Xbox power cord recall procedure from Microsoft.

Ringu DS

Evil Avatar refers a post on the WarpPipe forums where a poster has discovered that Nintendo's new DS is emitting a weak anomolous signal that can be picked up by TV antennas.

Whether the unintentional result of poor shielding, or an intentional hidden feature that Nintendo was going to introduce down the road through some sort of tuner peripheral, this effect makes my designer's brain spin with possibilities. Imagine a multiplayer game with one player's screen duplicated on the TV, while the other (up to 15 on a DS wireless LAN) work privately on their own screens. We've seen Nintendo try things like Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, and multi-player Pac-Man that might indicate future intent (whether using some sort of stand-alone tuner, or a future console add-on that uses the wireless network). I'm excited.

Then again, the DS might just be possessed by ancient evil.

Mogi Multiplayer Mobile

I just posted an article about Mogi, a multiplayer game running in Tokyo -

Mogi is brilliant because it ties the desktop web to the mobile internet. Hardcore players using web terminals can command mobile casual players to work in a team effort.

Mogi is brilliant because it anchors the reality of a massively multiplayer online game in physical space. You travel the "real" world, and as you do, you impact and interact with the virtual world. There have been other "location-based" multiplayer games that use the real world, but none have strewn items and people all over town for a pickup.

Mogi is brilliant because the gameplay is non-combative - people get started by collecting, and continue by trading. This should involve a broader range of people in more relaxing fun, meanwhile encouraging everyone who plays to engage mobile social networks in new ways.

Presumedly Mogi should be a big success. Today, it's a beta-tested French game running on a few handsets in Tokyo. In other words, Mogi should be a guiding light for the entire mobile and multiplayer online games industries.

Côte d'Ivoire Charge d'Affairs, call your agent.

We all get them: e-mails based on an original concept, the Nigerian 419 scam, formerly a post scheme called after the statute number of Nigerian law that makes them a crime. Typically, the contents have lots to do with you sending them a substantial chunk of change -- or the routing codes and numbers for your accounts -- to help them semi-licitly spirit a large sum of money out of their government's bank accounts and a rather small bit to do with the scads of money -- usually in the millions, US dollars -- they will send you after the money is safely tucked away in the Cayman Islands.

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There are no old, bold pilots.

When do you retire a game, even one of your all-time favorites? With a narrative game, that's a relatively easy decision: at the end of the game. Or one of the several possible endings of the game. Or when you've played through the game on the highest difficulty setting. Or when you've loved, lost and just flat given up on ever "winning". Okay, perhaps it's not such an obvious decision; but worse yet is determining when to quit playing a "sandbox" or non-narrative game, or a game with an online gaming competitive feature.

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DoubleScreen Precedence

Ahem - I don't think I remembered this in the excitement over Nintendo's upcoming DoubleScreen gaming device, but Nintendo has a history of making portable gaming devices with two screens for one game: MultiScreen Game & Watch.

The games are all simple arcade games, where the action flows vertically or horizontally across the device. Not a major shift in gaming architecture. Except this Zelda game appears to use the top screen for keeping track of your triforce and your inventory. Just the sort of innovation I would hope to see in the DoubleScreen - my curiosity is stoked by this legacy!

The Postman To The Rescue

No, not Kevin Costner. This has nothing much to do with the typical G+G=A fare, so I'll keep it brief:

The Department of Homeland (In)Security is considering a plan to have postal route carriers deliver antibiotics to residences and workplaces in the event of a "catastrophic biological event" (I think we can take this to mean a successful bio-terror incident). What does this mean? This means there is at least one smart individual with one good idea -- awash in a sea of dullards floating miserable strategies -- in the American terror-response bureaucracy. The US Postal Service is, and has been, a shining beacon of efficient execution in American federal institutions. Way back when, "back in the day" as you kids say, when Ross Perot offered to, for a fee, overhaul the US Postal Service, I declared, Good God! Don't let that man anywhere near the post office. There's nothing wrong with the Postal Service.

What I want to know is who this son of a bitch is. Let's make him, or her, president. Hell, let's make him God.

Hiking In The DMZ

I thought that some GGA readers might find interesting a recent public spectacle on MacRumors, a site, as the moniker boldly suggests, dedicated to news and rumors about Apple's Mac platform and the company's peripheral products and services, as well as the technologies behind these items. A news item discussion about Xbox 2 and possible 65 nanometer process IBM microprocessors or some such double-E nonsense -- apologies to EE track students and professionals; you people are a cut above, really -- quickly devolved into a console wars thread replete with thinly veiled, censor-evading expletives in the vein of "Xbox is sh**!" and "GameCube is for p**sies!"

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Apple Announces AtticAuthor

I just ran across this on a tech newswire and thought it might be of interest to some people. Not as much hype as GarageBand, but still, perhaps, intriguing.

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Hail Nintendo DoubleScreen

The news has dropped from Nintendo - their upcoming new device is a portable with two screens, the "DS" (double-screen).

This is unexpected, but brilliant. How many times playing Final Fantasy Tactics have I wanted to see my party's stats on a separate screen as I picked troops for a battle? Or wanted to look over the equipment list as I'm picking a character's weapons and abilities? How about Star Wars KOTOR - having a map on another screen at all times? Maps and stats - a second screen is the perfect RPG/Adventure game accessory.

I am more enticed by the prospect of Double-Screen information more than immersion.

Besides the self-contained action on Nintendo's own Game and Watch series, the Dreamcast VMU was the first device I saw where a second, albiet tiny, screen complemented the action on the TV. And then Nintendo's GameBoy/GameCube linkup. Supposedly the GC version of Splinter Cell will display a level map on your GameBoy if you play that console game through your portable.

I recently played Deus Ex: Invisible War on a computer with two monitors and I wasn't able to pull up any extended action, let alone extended stats. Even if the second screen had just run advertisements for NG Resonance or Pequod's Coffee it would have added to the ambience. Fallout? Director's cuts of games you love - while you play on one screen, fake advertisements and concept sketches flash by. Yum.

These are computer game fantasies. Ninendo's device is designed for portable play. And the first wave of titles have not yet been announced. Let's see what Miyamoto has in mind. And let's hope this innovation doesn't go the way of the Virtual Boy, an aborted gaming platform that's become a curiosity and collector's item.

My GBA SP, even chicken-style, it's eminently portable. Will most people want to add a second screen to their pocket-load?

For now I'm thinking of this as a conceptual revolution - that Nintendo is helping spread the idea that games are going to take over your devices, across devices, across screens. I was at the Consumer Electronics Show this year and there were flat-panel TVs everywhere, with little PDA-type controllers. Let's hope Nintendo proves that games can use multiple panes of information, pushing the envelope for interface and information density in games.

(More analysis from GameSpy, if you click on the "commentaries" link at the end of that news story)

Videogames: a Living Work of Science Fiction

For years now we in the video-game community have had to look up to the film industry as far as art is concerned. Obviously, since there are no real limitations other than the animation and modelling tools themselves, the sky's the limit as far as film is concerned when it comes to poly counts, texture resolutions, mutli-passes, etc.

We've always been picking up their scraps, as it were. Trying to squeeze in this technique here, possibly adapting that technique there. Occassionally lusting after the next generation system so we can push the envelope one more inch closer to what we see on screen, graphically.

But in a twist of fate, it would seem, the film industry has something to learn from videogames.

In the newest LotR movie: Return of the King, Peter Jackson turned to programmers to have the hordes of minions and soldiers react in real time to events happening on the battlefield.

"So each of these computerized soldiers is assessing the environment around them, drawing on a repertoire of military moves that have been taught them through motion capture - determining how they will combat the enemy, step over the terrain, deal with obstacles in front of them through their own intelligence - and there's 200,000 of them doing that."

This sounds familiar... Oh wait! It's like what I take part in everyday at my job! Motion capture animation sequences, and put them in the game engine while programmers script them to be reactions to in-game events. The only difference here is scale; we can't possibly have 200,000 characters onscreen behaving independantly. Hell, we'd be lucky to have 200,000 characters onscreen; it's a limitation of the hardware.

The only thing I found upsetting about the article explaining all of this is that there was no reference to how similar - if not downright borrowed - all of this is to video-game AI. All they've done here is re-create the wheel on a much larger scale (granted, a very impressively large scale). The only thing that's new about this is that it's in a movie, and not a video-game.

"So to create these individual agents, there was a code that was especially written and developed," Taylor says, adding that it was like being involved in a living work of science fiction.

We know, Mr. Taylor. We've been living and playing in virtual worlds of science fiction and fantasy for decades now. Perhaps you might like to join us.

Psst... Hey, Buddy, Augment Your Reality?

So, how about that Augmented Reality?

I recently attended The 2nd International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality in Tokyo, Japan. From my time hobnobbing with other presenters at ISMAR03 and the related Augmented Reality Toolkit Workshop, I can say that this is a technology that gamers would do themselves a favor to get aquainted with. Currently, the Sony EyeToy is the only real forray into commercial use of (limited) AR tech for entertainment applications, although non-commercial explorations exist. ISMAR03 Keynote speaker Nassir Navab, of Siemens Corporate Research, centered his entire speech on getting the AR development community used to the idea that the technology is ready for prime time in the industrial sector, and that means its time for the game developer to raise her groggy head, get a web cam, and start hacking.

The simple truth is that, right now, there isn't that much to be said for AR entertainment. The BBC's R&D department has some interesting stuff for adding bits of AR to a news broadcast, and a few groups have done stuff for edutainment, but when it comes down to it, AR is an awesome, approachable technology with a high wow-factor and a vertible forest of low-hanging fruit. I say, time to start picking.

Taking "Mobile" to the Next Level

Perhaps file this under "Japan *is* form the future":
From the same folks who brought you the Bowlingual comes a tiny, cute little toy remote-control car that you can "drive" with your mobile phone. Perfect for the executive who has everything!

P.S. The Bowlingual, for those who don't know, is a device which attaches to the collar of your dog and translates what your dog is thinking. Although it's sold in toy stores as a toy, it's hugely popular and many dog-owners in Asia apparently swear by it.

More Stuff About War Games

From the New York Times:

"'Ender's Game' has had a lot of influence on our thinking," said Michael Macedonia, director of the Army's simulation technology center in Orlando, Fla., which plans to build a virtual Afghanistan that could host hundreds of thousands of networked computers. "The intent is to build a simulation that allows people to play in that world for months or years, participate in different types of roles and see consequences of their decisions."

The military has already licensed There's technology for testing in virtual worlds.

DOSBoxxing MoM

Upgrading your PC can be a perilous thing. While a PC can ostensibly play most computer games made in the history of this world, often a new version of Windows will no longer run old DOS games. A those early works you might want to study inaccessible!

Case in point: the classic Civilization-clone that one-upped Civ itself, Master of Magic. A UK developer called SimTex replaced "culture" and "technology" with "mana" and "spell-research," and "the huns" with "lizardmen" and ended up with an excellent ten year old strategy game that people are still trying to make run in Windows XP.

Well, they won't have to try any more - the next generation of pre-1993 DOS emulation has arrived. After some starts like VDMSound, finally DOSBox has solved pernitious extended memory problems to run Master of Magic (with sound!) after just a little bit of command-prompt tweaking. Now I'm trying to configure DOSBox to keep my MoM saved games.

I Need Some Advice

I found a store that sells refurbished GBA's for $50.00. I can even get a fushia one!

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