Fancy Hearing Cake

Signal boost! New student games on GAMBIT site

2009-08-29T18:23:24Z

Hey folks! The games built in my lab over the summer are now available from the lab's website. We took a slightly different tack this year, concentrating specifically on making games that would be useful for our researchers. This led to some interesting compromises (possibly only interesting to me and the people who worked on it) but, I'm hoping, interesting games as well. It's hard to tell, since I've seen these games evolve from day 1, but I'd love to get feedback. Gut-wrenching, soul-crushing feedback.

One of the compromises/decisions was to go with Flash (technically, we were using Flex) for most of the projects. This allowed us to share a lot of code between different projects and have the students help each other out. Plus, there was the benefit of players not having to install the game to play it, which is particularly useful for some of our games that are really data-gathering tools.

Abandon: This one needed 3D, so it wasn't in Flash, and requires Windows. It's a stealth/survival game, but the thing we were trying to do was to build a 3D art pipeline that didn't require rigging. The CSAIL-developed tools we were using did not save us nearly as much time as we hoped, but they actually all worked and the game shipped on time. It was a really big team, though... 10 people. The student producer really did a good job keeping everyone productive and communicative.

Camaquen: A little bit of character emotion modelling, a little bit of experimentation with NPC dialog, and a lot of user interface work. My big takeaway from this one was the extent to which speech bubbles changes the interpretation of lines of dialog. There are a lot of subtler discoveries that I'm probably missing. This was the most "building the game is the research" project of the summer, as opposed as building a game to support research or answer the question "will it work?" I really like the music in this one.

Dearth: Play this two-player... seriously, it's a great co-op game. The single-player levels seem to be a tutorial for multiplayer, but what's actually happening the game using a Markov Decision Process to replace your partner. The 20 two-player levels basically all break CSAIL's current algorithm, so now their researchers have some new tests for their AI. This project also had the only game designer who actually took my class, and although our Technical Director really deserves all the credit for steering this team, I have a misplaced amount of pride in this game.

Pierre: Insanity Inspired: Probably the most problematic team we had to deal with this summer, but they had a vision they were working towards, and they were going to make that game whether we liked it or not. I have some respect for that, but I can only hope that this team will one day realize that ignoring your publisher is not always a good idea. Still, I do find it one of the funniest games I've ever played, so there's definitely something there, and we're going to keep working on it to see if we can squeeze in the features we need.

Shadow Shoppe: The prettiest psychological test I've ever seen. We're trying to see if different cultures/genders/age groups have different associations with body shapes, which is dangerously close to profiling. It's amazing enough that the team took such a problematic topic and made it palatable; that the tool is actually robust and works as a game is a hands-down victory. I haven't seen any blogs highlight this one yet, with many people writing it off as a "memory game," which irks me. It's much more insidious than that, but on the other hand I should be glad that players don't realize how deep this game actually probes their assumptions.

Waker and Woosh: Most teams make a game during the summer. This team made two. Sure, they have the same physics, mechanics, and level designs, but there were enough assets produced to choke two large mammals. And they look and sound great. And it's an educational game for grade-schoolers. And it's a research tool that looks at how narrative framing affects the ability of players to understand and transfer the educational content of a game to other contexts. This team deserved an "overachiever" award. If you like platformers, play this one. (Give Woosh some love, by the way... most bloggers seem to be highlighting Waker.)

Wow, I wrote a blog post! How weird is that? Anyway, please play our games, and if you know someone else who might like them, let them know too. Thanks!

One more GAMBIT open house this Thursday

2009-07-26T21:00:06Z

When: July 30th, 6 PM to 8 PM
Where: The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, 3rd Floor (aka MIT Bldg NE25, 3rd Floor.)
Please sign up as visitors in the lobby when you arrive.

Hi folks! Our six newest summer games are getting close to ship date, so we're just looking for a few more testers to put them through the wringer.

Feel free to drop by any time between 6 and 8pm to play our games, but arriving earlier will give you the chance to play more games. We'll need to close the lab at 8pm to let our staff head home after a long day on the job.

One of our games this year is targeted at children aged 12-17; we could especially use testers in that age range, if any of you have children and would like to bring them. If you do bring children to test, please contact us beforehand, so that we can send you a parent/guardian consent form. If you decide to come at the last minute, that's fine too, but before your child plays any games, please look for Sara for a form to sign.

Please RSVP to gambit-qa@mit.edu, so that we will know how many people are coming. Thanks!

GAMBIT open house - test our games!

2009-07-13T17:50:25Z

When: July 16th, 6 PM to 8 PM
Where: The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, 3rd Floor (aka MIT Bldg NE25, 3rd Floor.)
Please sign up as visitors in the lobby when you arrive.

This thursday, please come to our Summer GAMBIT Game Lab Open House, play one or all of six games in development, and tell us what you think! Our students have been working hard for the last five weeks, and it's time to get some fresh eyes and fresh opinions on our games. We still have 3 weeks left of our 8 week process, so your opinions and thoughts will make a difference.

If you cannot make this Open House, please consider attending our second (and final) Focus Test session on July 30th!

One of our games this year is targeted at children aged 12-17; we could especially use testers in that age range, if any of you have children and would like to bring them. If you do bring children to test, please contact us beforehand, so that we can send you a parent/guardian consent form. If you decide to come at the last minute, that's fine too, but before your child plays any games, please look for Sara for a form to sign.

Please RSVP to gambit-qa@mit.edu, so that we will know how many people are coming - we wouldn't want the munchies to run out!

Cyberarts

2009-05-02T03:52:17Z

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.

Prototyping kit alpha

2009-04-28T19:09:11Z

Prototyping kit alpha
Originally uploaded by philiptan

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!

Media in Transition 6

2009-04-24T04:09:56Z

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!

philiptan @ 2009-04-14T15:49:00

2009-04-14T19:51:26Z

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.

Vote for CarneyVale: Showtime

2009-03-20T02:04:06Z

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 :)

Gam3rs the Play

2009-03-14T03:07:41Z

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).

CarneyVale: Showtime is available!

2008-12-22T13:15:12Z

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.

No H.G. Wells?

2008-12-09T02:59:12Z

Looks like the Nintendo DS is getting its own e-book software.

Free video game music concert TONIGHT!

2008-11-15T20:37:37Z

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.

Tapas

2008-10-13T14:08:18Z

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.

Spore

2008-09-20T05:32:20Z

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.

Disgaea Custom Soundtrack

2008-09-03T12:36:34Z

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.

Ethernet questions

2008-08-16T19:13:56Z

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?

So, we finally managed to close on a house last week! And it was exciting, for a couple of hours. Now we're starting to work on moving and getting all our services transferred to our new place. Yes, we're still in Davis, just closer to the Citizens Bank and Diesel.

One of the things I really like about the new place was the fact that there are RJ45 wall plates all over the house. However, upon checking the basement today, I realized that all those lovely plates are basically connected to a pile of bare Cat 5e cables dangling from the ceiling. No heads and barely serviceable labeling. Not having put together my own Ethernet cables before, I'm not looking forward to having to trek between the basement and the attic to verify cable continuity for 8 dinky strands of copper. (Repeat for the 8 other jacks in other parts of the house.)

So I'd like to get a LAN tester kit, sticking a terminator in each wall jack and holding a probe in the basement. However, LAN testers aren't available off-the-shelf at Radio Shack. Neither are RJ45 heads, apparently. I could order a kit for slightly less than $200, but that's approaching hire-someone-to-do-it-for-you-properly prices. There's some urgency, since we have to move out of our old place by the end of next week, and I need to know what the heck to do when Comcast comes by next Friday, just to verify that things are working.

All the coax and twisted-pair all congregate in one place in the basement, but given my router's flakiness, I'm tempted to put the router/cable-modem somewhere with easier access, just so I can reset it when necessary. The alternative is getting all-new hardware. I need an expanded switch anyway, which is why I'm considering getting one of those patchbays you see in MIT that are basically giant piles of tri-color rackmounted vermicelli.

If push comes to shove, my plan is to stick an Airport Express base station on one end and sit in the basement with my laptop, router, and a crimper. If I can pick up the Airport Express using iTunes' remote speaker, I'd know I've got... something working. But I have no idea how to tell if something's working properly or barely functional.

If you've read those paragraphs above and are going "NOOO! YOU FOOL!" in your head, please write in a comment. I openly admit I don't know what I'm doing here and am counting on the benevolence of blog readers to save me from myself.

New keyboard

2008-07-31T01:57:17Z

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 :)

Wow, bad day

2008-07-29T21:25:12Z

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.

Yesterday was pretty good

2008-06-29T14:09:56Z

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.

I'm doing it wrong

2008-06-24T02:23:04Z

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 "..."

I have the most awesome staff ever

2008-06-09T04:34:48Z

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.

3M Magic: Office Depot Invisible :: 3M Transparent : ?

2008-06-06T22:35:04Z

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.)

Million-dollar idea

2008-06-05T15:09:39Z

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.

I wonder what sort of currency they use... acorns?

2008-05-17T13:02:34Z

If Totoro had a laptop, I'd imagine it be carried in something like this.

No, I'd have no idea what use a Totoro would have for a laptop. A combination nightlight/bellywarmer, maybe.

Whiny

2008-05-12T00:26:14Z

Another weekend, another day at the office. I had to punt important social engagements because I had to vacate my current office by tomorrow (goodbye sunny Stata Center view, hello gray parking garage) and couldn't put off the move to the evening because of a scheduled 9pm call to the Singapore office.

I started to write a rant here, but I'm exhausted. Maybe some other time.