Minifacturing

Previously on ProjectPerko: the problem of 3D printing. This week's episode: Makerbot makes a move!

I think this is a good first step. At first, I was a little derogatory: they're essentially manufacturing need for manufacturing when there isn't really any. But after a moment, I became more positive.

There is no need for "crowdsourced manufacturing" or even its superset brother "minifacturing". As I said, there's simply no particular interest among the public for being able to build small numbers of a huge variety of things. Most people are happy to buy one of a billion manufactured, non-customized objects for a fraction of the price.

However, I do not think this disproves the concept of minifacturing. The idea of manufacturing things in your basement seems outlandish and unreasonable, but so does having your own personal computer. I can't imagine any reason anybody would need their own home computer.

So I do think that minifacturing has a tremendous future. I don't see it exactly, but I see its shadow, in the same way that you could see the shadow of the internet on the first personal computers.

And I think that manufacturing a need is, for the moment, not a bad idea. Sure, it's just a shadow of real demand... but these sorts of things might help shape a real demand. And once that happens, maybe things will change.

Personally, I still think that minifacturing's breakthrough probably lies mostly in guerrilla home-improvement: minifacturing solar panels, water purifiers, etc. But I wouldn't bet one way or another. Shadows are notoriously hard to interpret.

Join us again next time, same print-time, same print-channel.

Expectations of Control

I keep thinking about control in games. Because I'm a simulationist at heart. I want to know that if I push this to happen, then other things happen descending from it.

I remember reading Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, which fascinated me even if I never followed the combat rules or anything else that required stats or dice. It didn't bother me that I couldn't "choose the things I wanted", because it was presented in such a way that it was obvious there was no real simulation involved. I was just navigating something that was already written.

Similarly, I don't feel disappointed by adventure games or other very heavily-scripted games, because it's obvious there's not any kind of adaptive simulation. Funnily enough, as soon as these games include even a hint of adaptive simulation - such as giving you choices between two distinct plot branches - I start to get itchy.

"You gave me a choice, which means you CAN give me choices, which means you SHOULD give me choices, but you aren't, which means you suck!"

Obviously, I understand intellectually that most of these choices are of the choose-you-own-adventure variety and are not simulated. But I grew up with so many simulators that the itch is very strong.

This is the reason I dislike Knights of the Old Republic, and anything else that gives you "good or bad" choices. At first it seems like a simulation to my instincts, but even when I realize it's not, I still want more detailed and reactive control over my goodness and badness.

Do any of you have this problem?

Advances in Game Design

I got in a short argument with someone on Twitter. He takes the position most people seem to take: that games have advanced technologically but not in terms of gameplay.

This sets my teeth on edge.

First, the two are inextricable to a surprising degree. We couldn't have a 3D shooter without the technology that allows it. We can't have Boomblox without decent physics simulation. We can't have Mario Galaxy without an overpowered level design system to keep developers from going insane. We can't have MMORPGs without the internet.

But more than that, game design has advanced tremendous amounts. It's just easy to ignore. Let's look at a few MAJOR, VERY COMMON titles.

Mario Galaxy. Would you dare to say it's just a platformer? That the design hasn't "advanced much" since Super Mario Brothers?

Prototype. I don't like the game, but the 'minor' technical upgrades allow it to have a smooth and flowing play experience. Is anyone willing to pretend it's not significantly different from Moon Patrol?

Dead Rising, with it's brick-wall learning curve, has an impressive design that not only unfolds a spiral of avatar upgrades but also allows you to use/destroy almost everything in the mall.

Even Gears of War is significant design change from early shooters. You can pretend that it and Halo are not significantly different from their predecessors, but only if you're willing to pretend that a car is not significantly different than a horse-drawn cart.

Shall I start talking about less popular games? I don't think I'll even bother.

I think the reason so many people think that game design hasn't advanced much is because it's possible to trace modern games contiguously into the past. When you can see the change tiny increment by tiny increment, it's easy to not even see the progress.

But the progress is there. We've made tremendous progress.

Not to say we're perfect, or that we're even very good. But don't pretend we're still standing on the sand thinking about going in: we're already wading up to our knees.

Songish

(This is a parody of "Hallelujah" with the lyrics bastardized into a song about the discovery of pulsars. I woke up and it was in my head, so I wrote it down. Hope you enjoy it.)

I heard there was a secret star
that pulsed clear beats from afar,
But you don't really care for physics, do you?
It went like this, every second and a third,
A pulse that could clearly be heard,
Baffling and delighting with little green men!

Little green men! Little green men.

It was clear to most that the distant tone
Was long distance from an alien phone
But some math came in and stabbed right through you
You read it in your kitchen chair,
You checked that math in your underwear,
And every breath you drew was little green men!

Little green men.

Well, maybe deep in outer space
Is a suitably little green alien race
But ignoring the facts just isn't in you.
It's not a cry we heard at night,
It's not somebody's distant light,
And it's so cold and lonely without little green men.

Little green men. Little green men. Little green men.
Little greeeee-eee-eee-eee--eeeeeen men.

:D

"Reality"

Raph Koster found something interesting. A few people are touching up their screenshots. I'm sure this is most useful for the in-game advertisements, such as selling underwear or mecha or whatever.

It never really occurred to me that the same techniques used on real actors and models would be used on avatars. It makes sense, but it never occurred to me. I'd like to stretch this to its illogical conclusion.

Actresses and models are employed specifically as faces for metareality. Movies, underwear sales, etc. It's a given, when you think about it, that avatars in games will develop the same way. I imagine that once the uniqueness of the avatars starts to approach the uniqueness of a nation's population, the diversity will result in a similar diversity of jobs. So it's only natural that avatars will be employed specifically as (created specifically for) metagame stuff.

I'm trying to imagine the other rather unusual jobs that will crop up that have nothing to do with actually playing the game. I also like thinking about the differences that these roles will have from the real-people version...

What do you think?

Data Infrastructure

_{Not game related}

Recently I've been thinking about data infrastructure. Like your house has pipes and wires and vents, individuals are extending themselves using a data infrastructure that allows them to wrangle important data while offloading the boring, fiddly part.

Anyone reading this has a significant data infrastructure. We have vast stockpiles of sessions, cookies, login names, emails, and so forth. While these seem like passive storehouses of data, the truth is that programs are constantly accessing those storehouses and applying that data. While we may not personally use the infrastructure, it's there.

Working with systems that produce vast amounts of data is my day job, and in those situations the data infrastructure is much more significant. 99% of the data that is pumped into the database will never be seen by a human, but it is piped through an infrastructure and transformed into human-useful form through complex transforms.

This sort of data infrastructure is going to get more and more common as individuals start realizing that they want to monitor vast amounts of data without needing to manhandle all of it. For example, how many more years will it be before many people have a health monitor that scans their body's overall health on a day-to-day or even hour-to-hour or minute-to-minute basis? Simply looking down and seeing the present situation is useful, but to really be useful it has to have a history of data on you and the ability to determine what kind of changes mean what kind of things.

Not just health data: I can think of literally dozens of things that could pump data into our "data bloodstream". Power production and use. City contamination or health. Whereabouts of your friends and what instant-community events are around. Data trade on solving evolutionary programming problems. Or maybe that last one's just me.

The point is that we'll be developing more and more autonomous computing systems just to support the kind of monitoring we want to do. Figuratively, we're expanding our senses and memories to new areas.

I think its safe to say that many of the things we do manually today will be done automatically tomorrow. Like choosing backgrounds for your computer screens, or skipping boring tweets, or looking for interesting news.I even think we'll probably see a new kind of programming language which is far smarter about determining what you want to accomplish and the best way to accomplish it.

Not just data will be wrangled, though. I imagine that in a decade or two, when I walk into a coffee shop, my computer will figure out exactly how much caffeine I need and what other additives I'll want in my espresso... and order it for me.

What do you think?

Exploring Culture through Games

I've always had a fascination with teaching games (or learning games, or educational games, whatever you want to call them). Mostly I'm fascinated by them because they are terrible, and it's very interesting to think about how to design a better one.

Over the years I've come up with a lot of techniques that may or may not help, but one thing that's been more and more clear is that simply teaching science (or math, or whatever) isn't really a viable goal. Not only does it have to be anchored in some way to something that the player cares about, but it should also be taught in a context that makes it clear what the ramifications are.

For example, simply teaching about electrical current is possible. You could even make it a fairly fun puzzle game. But half of the amazingness of electric current is that we wired the planet with it. The whole planet, pretty much. The changes electricity have wrought on society are at least as important and probably more interesting than the way electricity actually works.

So lately I've been thinking about teaching games that teach something while being deeply rooted in some kind of cultural or social context. I like the idea of teaching science and technology, so that's naturally where my thoughts go. There's a lot to be learned by the cultures and contexts as well as just by the explanatory bits.

In fact, culture is largely driven by the available technology, and it's not hard to imagine games which not only educate about a technology, but also about its effect on a culture.

Here's a fun example: cell phones. Imagine a game set in a somewhat idealized Africa. (All games are set in idealized settings, although often ideal for violence.) Your "special power" is not that you are a wizard or a superhero or a car thief, but in that you have a cell phone.

Sound boring? Now, now, imagine for a second.

The primary power of a cell phone is to let you communicate with someone who is far away. This is a superpower to a destitute villager who doesn't have access to a cell phone. Instead of carting their goods to the nearest city and trying to sell them just to whomever is standing around, you can arrange for a buyer to be there, waiting, ready to pay an exact amount of cash.

If there is family far away, you can keep up with them and mitigate risks by supporting those who fall on harder times. If there is a disease or injury, you can call a doctor. If someone is lost, you can organize a search team. And, if you have web access, you can even do ridiculously insane things like get micro-loans from America or learn how to build a windmill generator.

The power difference between you and a random villager without access to a phone is roughly equivalent to the difference between a random fantasy villager and the legendary heroes you play. However, there is one very important difference: in the cell phone game, your power is proportional to the number of people who share it. You can only call people who have access to phones, after all.

The focus of the game becomes on integrating into your society. Both integrating yourself and integrating this new technology.

I think that sounds like an interesting game. And you'd certainly learn how cell phones work.

...

It's also possible to make games which span generations of technology rather than being about introducing a single paradigm-changing technology. For example, we could make a game about audio recordings, taking it from marks-on-paper to records to tapes to CDs to files to file sharing...

If each stage is as much about the culture arising around these developments as it is about the development itself, the game can be made much deeper and more interesting. For example, you could play a musician and his children/reincarnations/whatever. Struggling to succeed in each era, using what technology is available.

Moreover, it's possible to use this same idea to push into the future and show reasonable reflections of what technologies may cause to happen to culture. The nature of integrating players into the culture means you'll have to at least think about a plausible result, which is more than most people bother doing. Even if your cultural predictions are incorrect, it's still better than not predicting anything.

For example, you could make a game about the culture arising from widely available chemical fabricators, or AR gear, or rising sea water, or whatever you want.

Most people who do something similar use it as an excuse to revert culture. World War III destroys civilization and mankind reverts to tribal barbarism... that's hardly the sort of thing I'm talking about. The idea here is to be educational both about how whatever it is works and about the effects whatever it is have.

A smarmy global warming game where you try to deal with the aftereffects of rising sea water accomplishes nothing. You might as well make a game of pong in which your enemy's paddle is the height of the whole screen. The gameplay must also involve (in this example) play involving the same dynamics that cause the rise in sea water. IE, play will have to allow players to adjust the Earth's weather patterns.

Otherwise you're just being preachy and boring.

What do you think?