• The perfect geek age?

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 104 Comments

    Was being born in 1971 the perfect time to be born a geek?

    • It meant I got to see Star Wars in the theater, 13 times, at ages 6 and 7, exactly when it would overwhelm my sense of wonder.
    • I got an 8-bit computer at exactly the age when boys get obsessive about details, and I spent days PEEKing and POKEing and typing in listings from magazines and learning how computers actually worked.
    • It meant at least half the new games I played were actually new ideas.
    • And yet I got to play real pinball machines.
    • In real arcades.
    • New Wave science fiction was the used paperbacks laying around, and I got to read cyberpunk and steampunk as they were invented, and see SF when fandom was not yet a media circus.
    • I got to play D&D from as close to the beginning as most anyone.
    • And feel like I had inside baseball knowledge during the D&D scene in E.T., which the other folks in the theater didn’t get.
    • I was there for when the X-Men were new and fresh
    • I got to high school when PCs were becoming ubiquitous.
    • I got to college when Macs were on Apple campuses, and actually useful.
    • And when you had no choice but to use libraries for research, so I actually learned what real research is.
    • And I was too young to feel cynical about Dead Poets Society.
    • I got onto the Internet after it was tiny, but before it was mass market. So I got to see and use most of the tools and software that were key to its evolution, as they were used, then replaced, then discarded. Pine, gopher, Usenet, Mozilla…
    • I read Sandman when the issues first came out.
    • I got into the games business before it was mass media, but got to ride the wave.
    • …and also got to see the Web unfold…
    • …and got Wikipedia and Google just in time for when I didn’t need to use libraries anymore…
    • …and see some of the science fiction coming true.

    Looking back on it, it makes me feel a bit sorry for those born ten years later. And I can’t judge ten years earlier, but so much of that seemed to hit at the right age. Looking back at history, it seems like the last big waves of popular invention like this were decades ago. Teens with hot rods? Engineering in the 20s? I see my kids now, and they are so clearly getting the finished products of so much, not the products in the process of invention… Am I wrong?

  • Blerp & Minsh: layering the web

    Hours Categories Game talk, Misc
    Comments 10 Comments

    Blerp, a new property of the RocketOn folks, is a new social network with a twist. RocketOn, like Weblin, is a plugin that lets you layer stuff on top of the web. It was for avatars and MMOs, but now it’s been repurposed as a way to annotate the web. You get a frame around your browser that lets you drop text, pictures, and so on on various webpages. People you are linked to get to see the annotations, and you can slurp your networks from Facebook, twitter, etc. Blerp’s just opened its alpha, so check it out here.

    Minsh is a little different; it adds a virtual worldish layer to Twitter by representing the people you follow as fish. They use little chat bubbles to tweet, and you can click directly on them to reply. I suspect that using this tool will drive users further towards synchronous use of Twitter… It’s in closed alpha, but here’s a video:

  • Meep cupcakes

    Hours Categories Gamemaking, Misc
    Comments 3 Comments

    meep-cupcakes-001meep-cupcakes-002These appeared at the office today.

    Meeps have continued to develop as a mascot for Metaplace. In Metaplace Central, you can now go to a meep vending machine to buy them. They shoot out and land in the water to be eaten by sharks. Yesterday a user published a meep cannon on the marketplace. It fires them off at a high rate and they make a satisfying, gooey splat when they land. We now give out plush meeps to top performers every week. And they eat cupcakes too.

    And this one on the right is the one that I ate. You can tell by the nervous look on its face.

  • More on how the body & brain react to games

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    Gamasutra has a report from a GDC Canada session discussion the role of emotions in games — that is, a researcher who is not Nicole Lazzaro! And it sounds like a fun and meaty discussion.

    The counter is fear, which can cause physiological responses due to the “fight or flight” impulse. Many people love that sensation: “Look at the prevalence of the horror movie; it’s everywhere. Look at horror games.”

    “Surely there’s no harm in that? Well, actually, there is,” said Chandler: Scientists have recently determined that after sustained fear, bodies stop producing adrenaline and being producing cortisol, which begins to break down non-essential organs and tissues to feed vital organs, increasing pain, promoting heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.

    So, here we have “games can cause heart disease!” 🙂 Though it should be noted, so can shock horror movies… or perhaps excessive rollercoaster riding.

    There’s also a bit bolstering the arguments I made not long ago about how we have unconscious predispositions towards people and things that looks like people (such as avatars).

    Speaking of which, there was a lengthy discussion on that topic on the latest “Shut Up. We’re Talking” podcast, which has led to even more debate and controversy.

    Unfortunately, I think the SUWT crew missed the point a bit by saying “well, maybe mature or experienced gamers learn not to have these subconscious reactions.” Unfortunately, I don’t think that is true — any more than informed and mature people sail through those tests of their reaction times with photographs of people of mixed races. This is not an easy bias to remove…

  • Play This Thing on Brenda’s Train game

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 24 Comments

    Play This Thing writes up Train, the controversial game that Brenda Brathwaite made that continues to stir discussion here on the blog.

    She has sent me the rules to Train as well, but I don’t think I will write them up; my reaction is much like Greg Costikyan’s — the game is meant to be played, not the rules read with knowledge of the point. So discussing it solely from that point of view seems to undermine the actual work to some degree.