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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Philip" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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11:31 pm
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Cyberarts
Today, lots of people visited the lab! It was an open house advertised as part of the Boston Cyberarts/Cambridge Science Festival. We had families testing some of our games and making some new ones with Scratch. Most of the heavy lifting was done by the staff and the grad students, who did an awesome job. I pretty much just played tour guide and host.
Things generally went well, but I made one big faux pas. Keeping with the "arts" theme, we had a collection of games that game journalism had branded as "art", hoping to spark a discussion about the relative aesthetic merits of the games. So I loaded and played a little Bioshock to kill some time while waiting for the first couple of people to show up. Unfortunately, I left it paused in the Xbox 360 when some of the kids started showing up, as I tried to direct them towards the various activities we had set up.
It wasn't long before word got out that we had a copy of Bioshock in the lab and the (very much under 17) kids started demanding to play it. They started getting even more agitated after multiple attempts of failing to defeat Ganondorf. In retrospect, starting the kids out on one of the final boss battles of the Ocarina of Time was probably not a good idea. In a moment of weakness, I conceded and swapped the games, hoping to use Bioshock as an opportunity to talk about Boston game history. It pretty much fell on deaf ears once the bullets started flying, and one of the boys seemed to be pretty freaked out by the grotesque violence of the game.
About 10 minutes later I tried to cut my losses by switching to a different game with less disturbing imagery, but I think one of the other kids was even more freaked out by Parappa. I'm not sure if I was more disappointed by my lack of judgement or my later discovery that some of the kids had already completed Bioshock at home. One of them described the multi-year backstory of the game in precise detail while he fought off two slicers simultaneously.
Generally, though, the families all seemed to have a good time. I hope I haven't scarred the kids for life, or taught them that the first thing you should do upon finding a hypodermic needle is to jam it into your forearm. Then again, we ended the day with Metal Wolf Chaos, so permanent scarring is pretty much assured.
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03:09 pm
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Prototyping kit alpha
( Picture behind the cut )I've been taking a stab at assembling a gameplay prototyping kit for our summer students. This is itself a prototype... trying to get everything to fit in a neat little bag, collecting my favorite generic game bits, and figuring out what's missing.
The discs are already proving to be difficult... these are the old Ray Line tracer discs (5 colors, 10 discs each) that have a single notch, so you can use them to indicate heading. Or you can use them for victory points/currency tokens. But Ray Line has been bought out by a hockey equipment manufacturer, so I'm not sure if they still make those things in the quantities I need.
Update: Ray Line does indeed still make tracer discs in massive quantities! Score!
The index cards are another problem. They're cheap and easily restockable when you run out, but they take up so much real estate in the bag, and they're a little too big (3"x5") for a card game. That being said, having a large card means I can go with the cheapest Sharpie available, which has a pretty thick writing tip. (And the cards are great for Cartagena-style maps.)
The fold-up map is a fairly new addition. I'm not sure if it's necessary but it doesn't take up much space. One thing that I'm not doing is providing UI prototyping tools... there's just not enough space for glue sticks, scissors, Post-its, and other things I find useful for UI. Maybe I'll make a different pack in the future.
Anyway, comments would be extremely welcome!
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11:59 pm
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Media in Transition 6
The MiT6 conference looks pretty cool this year. It's a massive media studies conference in MIT, organized by my own department. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to register, and by the time I realized it, registration had closed. I tried to get in as a moderator on the one panel that wouldn't have been out of my depth but someone else beat me to it.
Coincidentally, BarCamp is also running this weekend, but I'm still going to try to sneak into a few of the MiT6 sessions. Wish me luck!
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03:49 pm
[Link] | Gam3rs: The Play is coming back for a one-night run on April 30th, from 6 to 8:30pm at the New England Institute of Art. It'll be at the Center Building (10 Brookline Place West) in room 1001. It's a free event, part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival.
Check it out if you missed the run at the MIT Museum. It's a pretty good one-man comedy about a guy who tries to play his MMORPG while he's at work.
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09:59 pm
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Vote for CarneyVale: Showtime
Hi folks! It's the last day to vote for CarneyVale: Showtime, our Xbox Live Community Game that is one of the finalists for the grand prize of the Independent Game Festival. Please vote, it's just a few clicks :)
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11:07 pm
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Gam3rs the Play
Just came back from watching Gam3rs the Play at the MIT Museum. It's a one-man show about a guy who works in tech support and who plays an MMO at work. It had good acting and a funny script, and they have another free performance tomorrow night (8pm at the MIT Museum, doors open at 7pm).
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08:08 am
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CarneyVale: Showtime is available!
Hi folks! The first honest-to-goodness, publicly available console game from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab is now downloadable from Xbox Live Community Games! It's called "CarneyVale: Showtime". If you've got an Xbox 360, download the trial and give it a shot. (And if any of you have friends who write for game review blogs, tell them to do the same!)
Of course, if you like it, you could buy it :) It's only $5 (400 Microsoft points) and every sale improves the chances of the GAMBIT initiative continuing past 2011.
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09:59 pm
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No H.G. Wells?
Looks like the Nintendo DS is getting its own e-book software.
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03:37 pm
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Free video game music concert TONIGHT!
Saturday, November 15, 2008
6:30pm - 8:30pm
Church of the Covenant
67 Newbury St.
Boston, MA
VGO is proud to announce our upcoming concert, Another Night of Symphonic Video Game Music.
With 45 musicians + Berklee Chamber Choir Club consisting of 40 finest singers from Berklee, VGO will be performing arrangements of Chrono Trigger/Cross, Advent Rising, Blue Dragon, Liberi Fatali from FF VII, and a lot more pieces that you have to find out at the concert.
Admission is FREE, so please bring your friends and family to support us!
VGO is a student/alumni-run, non-profit orchestra that exclusively performs contemporary, orchestral arrangements of video game music, all arranged by student composers. Consisting of players from over 17 countries who are students in Berklee College of Music, The Boston Conservatory, The New England Conservatory, and Boston University, the internationally diverse, multi-cultural orchestra creates a very unique taste in its sound.
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10:06 am
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Tapas
To celebrate the most Spanish of U.S. holidays, my wife and I headed to Tapeo on Newbury Street yesterday. If you do eat there, make sure to get their scallops in saffron cream sauce. It's really good.
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01:32 am
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Spore
I've been playing Spore all week, and I think I'm done with it until I hear about patches or updates. I am, however, convinced that the game has taught me something about the being on the receiving end of current US foreign policy.
I was having lots of fun right up to the Space stage. Once I turned into a spacefaring race, though, aliens demanded that I give them money that I didn't have. Not having anything to offer, I ignored them, and they started bombing my colonies and homeworld. Needless to say, my colonies weren't producing much in the way of resources while they were being attacked, and my little ship had to fend off attacks and rebuild all the damage. However, every time I finished fixing everything up, I would literally be attacked within five seconds.
The kicker is this: surrendering requires money, money requires trading, trading requires peace, peace requires surrendering.
I have never thought that a computer game, much less a Will Wright computer game, could make me empathize with the situation in Iraq so vividly, but there you go. Procedural rhetoric is a bitch.
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08:34 am
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Disgaea Custom Soundtrack
Just got the new PS3 Disgaea today and it came with a bonus music CD. I didn't have time to play the game last night, but the opening track on the CD is a great vocal version of the lobby background music from the original original Disgaea. A recommended treat for Danny Elfman fans.
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02:44 pm
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Ethernet questions
Hi folks, some questions:
1) Could I borrow an RJ45/Cat 5e LAN tester kit from someone? Or a 110 punch tool?
2) Does anyone have any experience wiring up a home with Ethernet? I could probably use some advice, particularly if you've run bare wire and terminated cables yourself.
3) If you've hired someone to wire up your home for you, any recommendations?
4) Is it better to buy a patchbay that punches down to bare twisted-pair wire instead of crimping RJ45 heads for a home network?
( Short story long... )
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09:53 pm
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New keyboard
Not only did the Apple Store replace my keyboard (which I had to pay for) they replaced my trackpad, mouse button, power button, and top-case grill plate for my Macbook Pro (none of which I had to pay for). Feels like I just got my laptop refurbished, actually :)
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05:27 am
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Wow, bad day
Seems like I generally post on days where things are going well or when things are going terribly. I just had one of those "everything I touch, breaks" days. I even got coffee on my personal laptop.
I wish I could go home right now, but I have to run a screening for the students. Oh well, at least it's a good movie.
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09:58 am
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Yesterday was pretty good
Saturday was pretty much a perfect day. Cool and overcast but not actually raining, getting new comfy boots and two new books, starting and finishing Coraline, a grand circuit of Lyndell's, True Grounds, Soundbites, Japonaise and Le's, getting all the unused Wall-E tickets refunded, actually watching Wall-E with the lab, and co-op Lego Indiana Jones with my wife to wrap things up. Even the MBTA didn't glitch.
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10:20 pm
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I'm doing it wrong
Me: "Since you've all been working so hard, I got everyone tickets to Wall-E!"
Singapore students: "We all just bought bus tickets to New York for the weekend."
Me: "..."
Honestly, I spent the next hour going "..."
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12:28 am
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I have the most awesome staff ever
Crisis averted, for now. Managed to get 56 beds for all the Singapore students and mentors (and one GAMBIT researcher) stuck in Chicago. None of which would have been possible without amazing coolheadedness by Gene Fierro and Doris Rusch.
I need to start issuing medals or something.
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06:35 pm
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3M Magic: Office Depot Invisible :: 3M Transparent : ?
Need to get more office supplies before the flood of Singaporean teenagers. Does anyone know what's the Office Depot analogy of 3M Transparent Tape? (The classic glossy kind... I can't stand how "Magic" tape magically disintegrates when you try to remove it.)
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11:09 am
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Million-dollar idea
I've taken to massaging adhesive putty (Blu-tack, etc) as a stress relief. Given that putty needs to have some kind of solvent in it to keep it pliable, how hard would it be to add something good for your hands into putty? Say, hand sanitizer, or aloe.
I'd forfeit all royalties for this idea in exchange for a lifetime supply of the stuff.
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