Juggling Fish

New Home for Dustin's Blog

2009-11-29T22:29:00.002-05:00

Hey, if you came here somehow, you probably want the NEW and SHINY home of the blog at:
http://dustinfreeman.org/blog/

Improv tour diary

2009-01-25T13:50:00.003-05:00

I went out checked out Jet City Improv in Seattle yesterday. I've been so obsessed with longform the past 2 years that I had pretty much forgotten that short form existed. My two favourite games currently are He Said She Said and Three Way Dub, mostly because they are split-control games. Here's 3 games I saw yesterday that I had never heard of/seen before and really liked:

Double Blind

2 improvisors (C,D) leave the room. The remaining two (A,B) perform a short scene from a suggestion. A leaves the stage and C is called in. C gets a new suggestion and now B and C perform a scene. B says the same lines and performs the same physicalization as before, while C improvises along. At then end, D is called in. D gets a suggestion and performs a scene with C, where C must use the same lines and physicalization as they just performed.

This is a great combination of broken telephone and the game Actor's Nightmare. I could easily see it being extended in a few ways. Like Actor's Nightmare, it is funny when moments align well as well as when they are non-sequiturs. However, the scenes need to be pretty short to be memorized. Bold choices in the scenes are really helpful here, as it makes the subsequent alignment/non-sequiturs much more entertaining.

Game-O-Mystery

This is pretty meta. 1 improvisor (A) leaves the room, while the other improvisors come up with a game. They come up with a name first ("Mish Mash" this time) and then simple rules, from the improvisors only. Then, A comes back, and they get a suggestion and perform a hilarious scene, after which A sees if they can guess the rules.

This time, the rules they made up were:

If someone speaks, at least one other person must be squished into them
If A raises their voice in pitch, everyone claps and we change scenes.

It makes more sense if the improvisors come up with the rules, since game rules are very important to make a scene "work." Also, its more entertaining if the rules have some dependency on what A does. Rule 2 didn't get triggered for a while, so one improvisor came in with the feed of "sex-changing powder" (the suggestion was "Renaissance", from yours truly) and in improv-land, the way to act female is to just pitch your voice up 3 octaves. This game is very familiar to Interrogation.

Backwards-Forwards

They played a game many people have seen, where an improvisor sits on the side of the stage and plays the scene like a video, "backwards" or "forwards". (Aside: do people ever say "ahead by one frame"). When going backwards, the improvisors would say their lines forwards. This could be a point of contention if you cared enough. Personally, I enjoy trying to make backwards vocalizations, but it helps for remembering where you're going if you actually say the lines.

After establishing the scene for about a minute, they did something I had never seen before: they rewinded to before the beginning of the scene! This provided some interesting exposition about one of the characters (he was undead, and could come back to life by inhabiting someone else's body) which "explained" some of the apparent intentions of the characters. The exposition was made more interesting because the first time we (the audience and improvisors) saw it, we were going through it backwards. This seems like a good reason for not making backwards vocalizations.

The show also had a dedicated musician and lights controller. The lights didn't go just on and off either, but they had "disco", "horror", etc. modes. Check them out if you're ever in Seattle.

Diamond Touch Projects

2009-01-18T10:39:00.002-05:00

While working on 3 courses last semester, I got a head-start on some research ideas. When I was starting out, I was simply interested in the idea of "Miming and Mimicry" as an inspiration. After many discussions, I've developed further ideas, but still with Miming and Mimicry as the seed. Here's the most tangible of what I've worked on:

This first one, which I titled "Space Shift" certainly doesn't count as a finished Contribution To Research, but I whipped it together quickly to try an idea out.

This second video is more about manipulating objects on desktop. Most people, when thinking of multitouch, think of the ubiquitous "Look ma, I'm moving photos" demo. This uses very literally realistic physics, which is great because it takes advantage of the physical intuition we already have. I played with a few very simple ways of using non-realistic physics. I am also working on (in progress) creating new "types" of physics by miming. At the end of this video, we see a copy gesture inspired by miming.

Where I'm going, where I've been

2009-01-08T17:58:00.010-05:00

Near the end of the first semester of my Master's, my research topic was becoming clearer - along the lines of "teaching the use of gestural interfaces". This was motivated by the proliferation of gestural interaction in devices of many form factors. Much of my thoughts on this were driven by my improv and theatre background, especially with respect to miming and mimicry. After some emails were sent, and calls made, I have been hired an an intern at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington from January to April to work with the Microsoft Surface team on teaching gestural interface use, and to measure how well a user has learned. With that in mind, here's the courses I took last semester and projects I did.

Computational Biology
This course takes problems solved in computer science and maps them onto problems in biology that are becoming harder as more data becomes available. I initially only took this course because I am required to take "breadth" in my courses, but it turned out to be pretty enjoyable. I was part of a sub-group that examined current research into codon bias. My final project was on modifying a gene from one organism to another to make it perform better, with respect to codon bias. I wanted a picture from each course I did, but since I don't really have a good one for Comp. Bio., here's a bunch of completely unexplained equations I made for my final project.

Ubiquitous Computing
Ubicomp helped me get more coverage in the literature of my field, although more on the ubiquitous, rather than interactive, side. I was interested in ambient displays, and my project partner was interested in household devices, so we came up with the humourous yet sincere project title: "Devices that Bruise: Battered Device Syndrome". The idea was to give everyday items the ability to give feedback if they received damage, either causing immediate harm, or causing harm if this behaviour was continued in the long run. Below is what we imagined a door would look like if it was slammed shut.

And here is a storyboard of some devices that have been "bruised".

In addition to giving the user's feedback about unintentional misuse, these devices could let you know when you are in a bad mood, as the user above realizes. This is much like a good friend would alert you to your mood. For our prototype, we wired an accelerometer up to some LEDs, which isn't visually interesting enough for me to show here. One concern with this sort of behaviour feedback is that it might encourage the inverse response to what we are looking for, like in the art project love hate punch, which was one of our inspirations. User testing would have to be done.

Machine Learning
This was mentioned in an earlier post. Upon learning about the ability of Restricted Boltzmann Machines, which are pretty good digit classifiers, to generate new digits, I immediately wanted to apply it to HCI somehow. These animations were a large part of my inspiration. Given a user's ambiguous digit, I wanted to show a user how they could improve their writing to make it easier to recognize by the device. The philosophy here isn't to show the user the "perfect" digit, but rather to show how their given digit could be improved. Personalized feedback. I was afraid that the animations wouldn't be smooth enough to be pedagogical, but my professor said he would be surprised if they weren't. It turns out that the animations were very smooth, but did not always work perfectly. Below shows examples of digits that were improved, starting with the original digit at the left and evolving right.

For the above digits, the classifier can easily tell what the digits were, but improvement is still possible. However, for some digits in the dataset, it isn't really clear what was meant, and feedback on how to disambiguate towards either alternative must be shown. Below, we see an ambiguous digit in the centre. To make it a better 1, the evolution goes left. To make it a better 2, the evolution goes right.

Although it doesn't look that cool, I'm pretty exciting by these results. Classifiers in machine learning haven't been used in this way before, and I would like to think of more interactive ways to apply them. Generally, Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction are not as closely related as they should be, and I think they should be if we want to makes computers worth caring about.

Evolving Ambiguous Digits

2008-12-18T23:25:00.004-05:00

The above image represents my final Machine Learning project, Evolving Ambiguous Digits. I have just finished writing it now.

Yeah! First semester of Master's finished!

More details are to come (I will likely make a project page). But the above is the output of a neural network as represented by a Restricted Boltzmann Machine, when it is prodded in the direction of different digits. The top row is how the digit evolves if you poke the 'zero' neuron (think of it as poking the 'burnt toast' neuron) and each row down represents the next digit. Poking five works pretty well since it is a five already.

Blog Entry Ideas

2008-12-14T19:41:00.002-05:00

I keep a bunch of text files on my cellphone that contain random ideas I get while on the go, categorized such as 'Books I want to write', 'Funny ideas', 'Directives', 'Improv Ideas', 'To read/watch/play'. One of these files is 'Blog entry ideas', a collection of stuff I wanted to write or rant about but haven't yet. Well, I've had it for a year now, and still haven't written these posts. Possibly because I could never come up with a coherent way to express what I meant, I was too lazy, or I forgot what the hell I was talking about. Instead, let's do it the easy way and let your imagination fill in the blanks. This way, I don't have to write something, and you can imagine exactly what you would want to read about. Except where I've noted, these are completely unedited:

Academia vs industry: you always maximize stockholder value. In aca, that's you! But, you're hired on the presumption that stockholder value corelates [sic] highly with personal value.

An argument against knives

I've been going at it wrong. What is expressable [sic] through mime is viewable by the power of imagination and anything that tries to recreate that will destroy that effect.

Blog name: follow these instructions

Observation: movies like tropic thunder, kiss kiss bang bang and adaptation mock the film conventions of Hollywood initially, but then use all of them very effectively in their final acts. Is this out of homage, or mockery? Is it true that these ridiculous things are, inevitably, the most effective way to tell stories on the large screen? As an audience, are we so entrenched in film language that we can't expect otherwise?

The honour of the grind. Granddad Rahnasto [on my mom's side] once built the foundation of a house by himself. Conversation I had with a guy after the play copenhagen.

Dumb thoughts on clean hydrogen fuel. Where does it come from? Clean?

Numbing in the transfer from actor to audience.

On my approach to objectivity and art, specifically by script-reading. Why do I seek to be objective? Does it matter?

The implicit nature of geometrical shapes

Difference in interactive media between part of the 'plot' and something it is possible for the player to do. Who is responsible for their actions, ie drink driving in GTA or spousal abuse in fable.

Catch 22s and strange loops in godel's incompleteness theorem.

On genuineness and science. On the sliding scale of carefulness whenit comes to truth, where should you be? Not admitting a chance of failure. 'Religious' thinking.

User responsibility:
My viewpoint on things that can be "addictive", such as videogames and drugs, and the roles/responsibilities of users and designers. how my viewpoint has changed recently with my awareness of HCI. Acting like a baby as a user. Also applies to pieces of art that need to be understood. Eg. The knife in "no exit" - the audience is expected to notice it.

Coping with tunnel vision - epiphanies are important

Rationalizing decision time. Monetary. The value of my time and reducing stress

Improv Math: Military Clock

2008-11-20T01:01:00.004-05:00

A few weeks ago, I went to see PROJECTproject, an improv show in the Toronto area. They had just come back from a tour to Western Canada, and one of the things they brought back with them was a structure called Military Clock. I think they said it came from Winnipeg. I'm always on the look for interesting improv structures, and this has a mathematical tilt to it, so that's why I have written it up.

The way it works is:
- split the team up into two groups
- have each group form a circle on either side of the stage
- the people from either circle who are closest to the audience (two of them) are in the scene
- whenever anyone not in the scene feels that it is getting stale, they yell "Clock!" and both circles rotate
- a new scene starts with the two people who are now at the front
- repeat until you feel you're done, or everyone has had a scene

When I saw PROJECTproject do it, they had one circle of three and another circle of four, like below.

Go ahead! Click on the stage to make the clock run! Also, click on the arrows to add or subtract improvisors to each circle.

However, this only "works" for certain numbers of improvisors in the circles. Ideally, you want to be able to run the military clock around without having any repeats, and have every possible pairing of improvisors show up. When I saw it, the improvisors would keep their character for future scenes, so we saw all possible character combinations (7 choose 2).

So what numbers does it work for? It is possible to find these numbers for any troupe size?

To rotate through every possible combination, the size of the circles must be mutually prime.

Can every troupe size be expressed as a sum of two mutually prime numbers? NO. I'm also assuming we can't have circles of size one, since that isn't the spirit of the game.
It works for
5 - 3&2
7 - 3&4 (PROJECTproject)
8 - 3&5
9 - 4&5
10 - 3&7
11 - 5&6

It doesn't work for 6, sadly.

Does it NOT work for any troupe that is larger than 11? I am not sure. But seriously, who has an improv troupe larger than 11? Think of the egos!

Playing your part

2008-11-03T09:57:00.005-05:00

One of the problem with video games that have a story component is that the player you represent can behave inconsistently with the "story of the game". Games that do not have a story component, such as most Will Wright-style games, are the exception. An example of this problem is the very detailed story and character development of Grand Theft Auto IV, and yet the cartoonish violence which is actually fun and deviates from the character that the story has built for you. Also, in some levels of the Thief Series, it is sometimes just easier to sprint through an entire level instead of being stealthy, and thus having the entire complement of guard and monster AIs making a racket trying to find you.

Elsewhere, video games have adapted strange conventions to prevent this problem, such as the "silent protagonist" seen in many first-person shooters that avoids the sticky issue by simply shutting up.

One potential cool way to synthesize story and gameplay is to somehow reward or punish the player for acting more or less like their part. I hadn't yet seen this in a game yet, until I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Valve's upcoming game, Left 4 Dead. The Tank, concept art seen below, is one of the playable zombie characters in the game.

Obviously, this character is not meant to just sit still and remain pretty. Strategic thinking also doesn't seem to be suggested by its form. To quote the article:
"Also, the tank has a "Frustration Meter" which means that control will be taken away from a human player if the Tank does not engage the survivors for a certain time."
Cool! There are other varieties of playable infected that have different characteristics, and they don't have this same description. So, the game designers are suggesting a certain "play character" in their design. I can't wait to see what more comes of this.

Suggestion: make the physical appearance and gameplay characteristics change automatically based on the game learning a player's "style".

Note: The most famous silent protagonist is Gordon Freeman, the main character of Valve's Half-Life series. Valve is great.

How can computers use tacit knowledge?

2008-10-26T22:17:00.004-04:00

I'm seven weeks into my Master's, and the clouds are beginning to clear around my research topic. But first, an aside...

In my improv class at Impatient Theatre on Saturday, there was a scene that was described as "incredibly complex". We were playing with the idea of an "analogous scene" that explores and expands the themes of a previous scene in a different situation, with different characters.

The first scene was an old couple going through storage in their basement. As the scene progressed, there was subtle tension between the two, with the woman wanting to bring something up, and the man ignoring her, and instead bringing attention to some old toys. He passed one to her (a plastic Pony) and held one himself (a He-Man). He held the He-Man in front of his face and said "Hey there little Pony!" and so on. They weren't interacting as a couple anymore, but as two little toys. Finally, the Pony said that she wasn't sure if it was working out between her and He-Man, and that maybe they should re-evaluate their relationship. Both the woman and the man froze, the conversation between the toys having become about their relationship. The scene ended.

The second scene was two friends exploring the garage of a house that one of them was house-sitting. Strangely, there were a bunch of sports equipment and other costumes in the garage. The house-sitter started putting on and taking off equipment for football and hockey, etcetera, while the friend starting playing with some Star-Wars costumes. The more equipment the house-sitter had on, the angrier they would be about some issue with the friend (a car getting scratched, poster in their house being thrown out). Meanwhile, the friend thought they were just play-acting scenes from the Star Wars movies. At one point, the friend put a Yoda head on the house-sitter to try to get him out of his angry mode, but the house-sitter took it off, saying it didn't feel natural. Finally, the friend put the Darth Vader costume back on and got really angry about an insignificant housemate issue, attempting to show the house-sitter how he was acting. The house-sitter responded with "Did that happen in the movie?" and the scene ended.

The first scene took about 2 minutes, the second one took 4 minutes. We analyzed both of them for about 5 minutes apiece, and I still find myself thinking about them. When the improvisors were asked why they made certain choices, they couldn't actually verbalize their thinking or reasoning, yet all of them made amazing scenes. It turned out that the improvisors in the second scene had two very different in-the-moment interpretations of one part of the scene, yet they together made something that was interesting to watch from the audience.

In my continuing research about learning by mimicry, I've become interested in the idea of tacit knowledge, knowledge that is defined by its difficulty of communication. Tacit knowledge is usually passed by a learner observing someone else, whether they are explicitly a teacher or not. I assert that interactions that require or use tacit knowledge are more powerful and expressive than those that are not. While my initial motivation to explore this space was miming, a form of physical expression frequently used by people when words are not enough, tacit knowledge exists in the use of any sufficiently complex interaction. I use the metaphor of drafting while riding a bicycle as the way that a user can explore the space of existing tacit knowledge:

1. Advance tentatively
2. Have the space of previous interactions shown in a useful representation
3. Made a choice
4. GoTo 1

A small philosophical problem I have with this is that it seems to suggest that all possible interactions are pre-determined. Well, on a regular basis, the vast majority of interactions are pre-determined. New space can be explored by a different mechanism, but frequently it is built on existing knowledge from different areas that is synthesized, filling in convexities.

I want to focus this down to how tacit knowledge about physical interactions is communicated and processed by users. In particular, I want to focus on newer gestural interfaces, which are currently baffling to people that haven't seen them (I played with one, and it was trial and error). If communicating gestural information is possible, it also means we can move beyond the "list of (x,y) finger points" as the only possible interaction, which is embarassingly limiting given the possibilities afforded.

In the improv scene I wrote about above, the improvisors in the second beat didn't know explicitly what pattern they were following, but they did know it, and they could expand on it. This is a power that is hard to express in existing interfaces. If computers can be made to express tacit knowledge, then I believe we've taken another step to the final goal: making computers worth caring about.

Image above is a hand painting that was made each night for a play I was in this summer, "For a Better World" or "Für eine bessere Welt", for Single Thread Theatre Company. One theme of the play, as I saw it, was the evolution of culture.

Stuck in Real Time

2008-10-19T18:02:00.002-04:00

At Friday's DGP party, a projector and a webcam was set up. The webcam was aimed at the party, and the projector was aimed at a large white wall, displaying the party. This is all good and cool, and if you aim the webcam so that it sees part of the projection, then you get fun feedback.

However, the clincher was that the projector displayed what happened on the webcam 2 minutes in the past. This led to the party itself becoming self-aware, where much of the discussion led to what had happened 2 minutes ago. Since the webcam was aimed to produce feedback, then this included what happened 4, 6, 8 minutes ago too.

As the party continued and my own personal inebriation increased, combined with my recent play-through of Braid, it occurred to me that the projection on the wall represented a barrier between this world and the world from 2 minutes ago. I wanted to cross this barrier, and be in both worlds at once.

Me taking a picture of myself taking a picture:

I created a sequence of movement of myself in front of the projector that lasted about 2 minutes, and kept repeating it and repeating it. The more I did it, the more I aligned with the past version of myself. As the party kept going on in parallel worlds, I was the only person in every world at once.

Mathematical Recreations - Tetris

2008-10-03T00:14:00.003-04:00

So, I was doodling while watching an episode of The Wire, and I came across this curiousity. Let's look at Tetris pieces, from the popular video game Tetris. Another way to define these is the set of arrangements of four squares where you can travel from one square to any other given square by shared sides. Go ahead and try to think of any that are in that set that aren't in the above picture, except by changes in rotation.

Now, since we're doodling, lets see if you can draw all of the Tetris pieces without taking your pen off the paper, and without crossing over or drawing on top of an existing line. Try it. Well, it works for some, and it doesn't for others.

Now why?! It's a little baffling. But, like any mathematical curiousity, it is made simple by breaking things down into constituent parts. The parts of the pieces where the rules are applied directly is at the joints/crossroads, so let's try to categorize them:

[Below here there are spoilers, beware]

Going from left to right:

One: In all of the pieces, there is no joint with only one line coming in, since this wouldn't be able to make a square.

Two: There are many joints with two lines attached to them, but they have to be at corners, not like I've drawn it above. When you're drawing the continuous line, you come in one way and go out another.

Three: If there are three lines attached to a joint, it must mean that it is an endpoint. See what I mean? Since you can't come in to an intersection more than you go out, and vice versa, then that means you need to stop in the intersection. This will be made clearer when we look at four.

Four: Since there is an even number of lines, you can go in twice and go out twice.

Now, let's number the joints in our Tetris shapes:

See? Only the top two shapes (I wish I had names for them) have exactly two endpoints, the points labeled with a 3. All the other pieces have more than two, and if we're trying to draw a continuous line you can't really stop or start more than twice, can you?

Implicitly Explicit

2008-10-01T15:55:00.003-04:00

For the last 15 years or so, the state of the art in Human-Computer Interaction, and Computer Science as a whole, has been riding the line between the explicit and the implicit. I am trying very hard to understand this.

When we meet a new Thing, we apply very powerful algorithms subconsciously to figure out its behaviour until, finally, it becomes part of Our Understanding. We are highly unaware of how we do this, even if we are told to think it through. The most exciting applications in this area improve the ease of adoption of a new Thing. We give up quickly on Things that fail early, so making sure the first few dates between Us and Them go smoothly is very important. Long term success, termed "expert use" is harder to describe.

How do we define something Good?

Time is an important quantity to Us. Let us use Time to as a metric to evaluate the Good-ness of a Thing.

For what Goals shall we measure the Time?

A Goal should be something easy to measure, that can be done with both the old Thing and the new Thing. Let us compare them to determine the optimal Thing.

This process frustrates Me.

Jump back up a level.

When a Thing fails for Us a few times in a new way, our interaction paradigm switches from the Implicit to the Explicit. We construct rules and try to inference them. Sometimes this is good, and sometimes this is bad. Most of the time, Explicit reasoning should not be necessary. I am a fan of thinking that when a Thing is able to take over a part of our normal life, it frees more of us up to do more better and interesting activities. However, sometimes switching to Explicit reasoning is important. Feynman made a point, when speaking to physics students, that quantum mechanics is like nothing they have ever thought of before, not particles, not waves, not dice. It is entirely axiomatic.

Explicit understanding takes a very long time, but it helps build Implicit understanding (for some reason I am able to think of multi-dimensional vector spaces). It becomes a part of Us.

I have started taking classes with Toronto's Impatient Theatre Company, a improvisation group focused on the Harold, a type of longform improvisation comedy. The thesis here is (using unusual words) to organically discover the Pattern of Behaviour present in the suggestion given and the improvisors on stage. Organically, Implicit, means not imposed, Explicit. Why is this only restricted to comedy?

The best Things do not dissapear, they are consumed by Us. When we discover a Pattern of Behaviour, it quickly becomes interesting cool accepted normal required obligatory and we have moved on. Then, the Pattern of Behaviour may be extended and explored to more Patterns of Behaviour. Abusing a definition here, it is like there is a fractal structure to behaviour.

Is there a non-grey difference between "lots of Implicitness" and "Explicitness"?

How can one consciously empower oneself to use Implicit and Explicit modes? Can a Thing be designed to tell one how?

Can a Thing that

animates

draws

files

schedules

makes other programs

learn your Pattern of Behaviour and continue it for You?

boodly boodly boodly Boodly (the sound of a power up)

2008-09-25T14:41:00.005-04:00

So I've moved to Toronto and started my Master's in Computer Science. I'm living in a basement bachelor apartment only 15 minutes walk from school, surrounded by a variety of multi-cultural restaurants. In my building, The Bahen Centre for Information Technology, I have an office (cubicle, really) in the Dynamic Graphics Project on the fifth floor. I'm starting to scatter my workspace with post-its. Next to my monitor is a picture of the Vitruvian Man. Thanks to having to write a grant proposal, I even have a topic for my Master's research, "Developing Methods for Teaching Computer Interface Gestures by Mimicry"

Grad school looks to be busy, but awesome. I am surrounded by people almost always willing to discuss any topic in immense detail, irrelevant or not. There are a wealth of resources that I can learn from, to the point that you could spend years here without actually accomplishing anything (research). Your Research is really the main point. Everything else (courses, teaching, seminars) are really just a distraction - you're here to contribute to Knowledge. This semester, I'm taking three courses: Ubiquitous Computing, Computational Biology and Machine Learning. I initially didn't want to take Comp. Bio. because it is outside my field, but due to annoying "breadth requirements" for my degree, I have to. However the course looks fascinating.

Classes here don't carry the same format they did in undergrad. The template for every class is to take turns pre-reading some research paper, and then presenting it. By the ending of my classes, I should be an expert at:

1) Reading

2) Understanding

3) Presenting

The above list actually looks pretty important. It does leave room for computational and programming competency, but I think Machine Learning will be enough for that; I wish I had taken more statistics in my undergrad. However, having an applied math background gives me a jump ahead in some other areas.

When not at my desk, I've been out exploring places to eat and drink in Toronto (but not too much). For the first two weeks, I was able to drink a new beer I had never had before, and I was out almost every other night. When not out, I've been chilling in my bachelor pad. Having a bread machine and a BBQ and an oven (didn't have one last year) is awesome. I've also been seeing lots of improv: Impatient and PROJECTproject so far, but there's much more to come.

Crazy Dream

2008-09-15T09:32:00.004-04:00

So I'm in Toronto now, yada yada yada all is great and shiny and mucho-fantastic. But that's another post. For now, let's discuss a dream I had last night. I'm lucky to have pretty vivid dreams regularily, but this one was too odd to let go. I tried to send it in to my twitter, which I use much more often than this blog, but I couldn't make it concise enough. Here it is, in a sort of half-grammar:

Dream: Was sentenced to hang for mistakenly kicking and killing someone in soccer. Goodbyes to family and friends; neck-strengthening exercises. Dad said I could borrow car to flee to States. Realized this was ridiculous; became lucid; woke up.

Blood-Powered Multi-touch Sensing

2008-08-28T09:25:00.004-04:00

My summer research at the Human Media Lab involves large investigations into multitouch sensing. For large interfaces, this involves the user touching the surface under some sort of illumination while a video camera captures the entire surface, and then filtering is applied to determine the touch points of the finger. There are often issues with large amounts of noise. The particular technique I'm working with is Frustrated Total Internal Reflection, but there are many other ways to do it; Microsoft uses Diffused Illumination as well. For these surfaces, it is also convenient if you can tell the difference between a human body part touching the sensor, or if someone put a mug down on top of it.

Someone brought a Plasma Ball in last week, and it looks like it makes a great multi-touch sensor too:

If you've ever played with a Plasma Ball, you'll know that the strings of energy (I have absolutely no idea what the proper name is) dissipate out from the central sphere evenly, until one touches the edge of the outer glass sphere with a finger or other body part. Then, the point of contact glows bright pink and a much brighter strand attaches that point and the central sphere. This effect only works with objects that are properly grounded, such as a human body, which is even better.

Finally, I was playing with our acrylic surface, and noticed another technique that could work even better, and would also only work body parts: blood! Look at the pair of images below:

The point of contact between my fingers and the plexiglass goes from healthy red to pale white as the pressure makes the blood gush away! With colour filtering, this effect would actually be incredibly easy to pick up, given ideal skin and light conditions. I was not even applying that much pressure. The rings of frosting around my fingers in the second picture are from condensation.

3 Days left in Kingston...

Scientific Results

2008-07-29T12:39:00.002-04:00

An excellent quote from a paper I'm reading:

"A final thought before moving on. Science has one methodology, art and design have another. Are we surprised that art and design are remarkable for their creativity and innovation? While we pride our rigorous stance, we also bemoan the lack of design and innovation. Could there be a correlation between methodology and results?"

Greenberg, S. and Buxton, B. 2008. Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time). In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08.

Wizard of Oz in South Park

2008-07-16T14:19:00.002-04:00

In Human-Computer Interaction studies, we often simulate new interfaces in experimental trials before actually putting the effort into making them. Sometimes this simulation is interactive, like Human Media Lab's Display Objects, and sometimes it's a crappy non-interactive piece of styrofoam (like the first prototype for the iPod). Although the device is non-interactive, we can pretend it IS interactive, by either the user imagining that it is, or the designer standing next to the user making various noises or even grabbing the device intermittently and drawing it. When this happens, this is called a Wizard of Oz experiment, from the Wizard of Oz where a men pretends to be the powerful wizard by amplifying his voice and other effects. It has fooled everyone in The Land of Oz for a very long time, until Toto the dog (presumably not as easily fooled by the pyrotechnics) simply pulls aside a curtain.

The point is that simulation works, as long as we do not look behind the curtain. This is a very useful concept, and it is also pretty funny. This came up in a recent episode of South Park, Over-logging, where the internet goes down and panic breaks out. In one particularly hilarious scene, one of the characters, looking for online porn, finds someone that can perform a Wizard of Oz for him. However, it turns out to be disappointing.

The best part is that he automatically says click for the person drawing to hear him.

A conversation with the Google Earth API

2008-07-03T14:33:00.004-04:00

Dustin: Oh hey there, Google Earth, it looks like you have an API so that we can actually talk to each other.
GE: Yeah, hello! It's really useful.
Dustin: Well, we'll see about that. So, I've turned you on. Can you tell me what layers you have?
GE: Of course! I've got the Geographic Web, Roads, 3D Buildings, Street View.. [goes on a long list]
Dustin: Oh that's great. So, can you tell me what is in each layer?
GE: ...
Dustin: Hello?
GE: ...
Dustin: Oh. I see. Well if I zoom in, I can see that panoramas from Street View are now rendered as spheres floating in space where the picture was taken. That's really cool! But, I guess you can't tell me where they are. I'm looking at a few now. Which ones are they?
GE: ...
Dustin: Okay. What about this one? 482 Avenue of the Americas in NY, NY.
GE: Oh yes. I've memorized that one now.
Dustin: Okay. What do you see now?
GE: 482 Avenue of the Americas in NY, NY. That's all.
Dustin: Oh. Well, can you memorize that street view locations for 478, 486, 490 too?
GE: Yep! Done.
Dustin: Okay, what do you see?
GE: 478, 482, 486, 490 Avenue of the Americas in NY, NY.
Dustin: So you'll only tell me you see something if I specifically tell you to look for it?
GE: Yes.
Dustin: Well what about that panorama over there? 94 W 12th Street?
GE: Sorry I don't know what you're talking about.
Dustin: Really. Memorize 94 W 12th Street.
GE: Ah, yes. So now I see 478, 482, 486, 490 Avenue of the Americas and 94 W 12th Street in NY, NY.
Dustin: Okay fine, you're young so it's okay. Now, can you tell me in latitude and longitude where 482 Avenue of the Americas is?
GE: ...
Dustin: No? But its right there on the screen. I can click on it to make you fly to it!
GE: Oh, I can fly there!
Dustin: Where is 482 Avenue of the Americas?
GE: ...
Dustin: I said where is 482 Avenue of the Americas?
GE: ...
Dustin: Please fly to 482 Avenue of the Americas.
GE: Done.
Dustin: Okay, where are you now?
GE: [gives a series of latitude and longitude coordinates of where it's looking]
Dustin: I see. So, you can't tell me where 482 Avenue of the Americas is, but I can ask you to fly right to it and then you'll tell me where you are. It seems like you're trying to make my life difficult.
GE: [shrug]
Dustin: Okay, now that I'm sitting at 482 Avenue of the Americas and looking towards the horizon like I'm driving. Cool! So, let's turn to the left to look over there.
GE: [turns slightly to the left]
Dustin: Wait, hold on, I'm not in the sphere anymore. I've moved over to the right of the road somehow.
GE: Yes, I turned you around the Focus point!
Dustin: What? What is that?
GE: It's where you're looking at.
Dustin: I thought I was looking at the panorama at 482 Avenue of the Americas.
GE: Actually, that's what you told me to do, but I decided to fake it by making you look at a point 60 meters to the north at a really shallow angle. You weren't actually looking at the panorama at all.
Dustin: Can I look directly at the panorama at all?
GE: ...
Dustin: ...
GE: When I look at something, its defined by the point on the earth itself, and then the compass angle, vertical tilt, and distance I am from it. The panorama is just floating above the Earth, so you can never truly look at it.
Dustin: But there's little controls I have on you that let me move you around whatever way I want. However, when I actually want to talk to you I can only tell you to move in certain ways.
GE: Yes.
Dustin: Well okay. Let me think. I know! How about, instead of looking at a point 60 meters to the north of the panorama, I tell you to look at a point 60 meters to the northwest, and then make the compass angle so that the panorama is in the center of your view.
GE: Like this?
Dustin: Wow! It's like I rotated 45 degrees around the panorama.
GE: No it isn't. Not exactly. That's not what I did.
Dustin: Shut up, it looks like I did, and that's all that matters.
GE: Okay.
Dustin: So, in order to rotate around a panorama as if I'm viewing it, I need to exactly tell you the panorama I want (I can't ask which panoramas are available). Then, I have to tell you to fly to it. Then, I have to ask you where I am, and the answer you give back to me is some point 60 meters away from the panorama. Then, I have to do some clever trigonometry to figure out where on earth the actual panorama is. Then, in order to rotate around the panorama to look at it from different angles I have to make up different points on the Earth in latitude and longitude which are on the opposite side of the panorama I want to look at. Then I can tell you to fly to those points, which don't explicitly look at the panorama but panorama happens to exactly be in the way of the point on the ground I told you to look at.
GE: ...
Dustin: Right, you're not much help here are you?

Wierd times on the internet

2008-06-13T16:04:00.003-04:00

Keywords: advertising, user-generated content.

So I just got an email from youtube about a music video I made a long time ago. Here it is below:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

YouTube | Broadcast Yourself™

Dear YouTube Member:

UMG has claimed some or all audio content in your video Golden Videotape (part 1). This claim was made as part of the YouTube Content Identification program.

Your video is still live because UMG has authorized the use of this content on YouTube. As long as UMG has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video's page.

Claim Details:

Copyright owner:	UMG
Content claimed:	Some or all of the audio content
Policy:	Allow this content to remain on YouTube. Place advertisements on this video's watch page. Applies to these locations: Everywhere

UMG claimed this content as a part of the YouTube Content Identification program. YouTube allows partners to review YouTube videos for content to which they own the rights. Partners may use our automated video / audio matching system to identify their content, or they may manually review videos.

If you believe that this claim was made in error, or that you are otherwise authorized to use the content at issue, you can dispute this claim with UMG and view other options in the Video ID Matches section of your YouTube account. Please note that YouTube does not mediate copyright disputes between YouTube owners. Learn more about video identification disputes.

Sincerely,
The YouTube Content Identification Team

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyway, way back in high school I made this weird impromptu video with two close friends of mine, and we happened to stick a bunch of Blink 182 tracks over it. I'm way too lazy to look up the proper legal way of ensuring fair use, but we gave credit at the end of the video (part 2). Now it seems that Universal Media Group (UMG) has discovered this. When I first saw this email I got freaked out because I thought I was getting sued, or my account was going to be banned. However, it seems that UMG just asserts the right to "advertise" and, sure enough, I've now got a little advertisement box next to my youtube video's page. This is actually really smart. I don't get sued (which is a waste of their time anyway) and they get to profit of me and my friend's remix of their owned works. I'm not sure what the long-term implications this are, but I think it's a pretty sweet deal for all concerned.

Meta-blogging

2008-06-10T11:29:00.001-04:00

My friend and fellow improvisor Monica Heisey interviewed me about blogging for the Queen's Unversity Journal (student-run paper). Link!

Where I work

2008-06-02T23:02:00.003-04:00

Here is where I work at the Human Media Lab. I've got a great view overlooking the construction on the Queen's Centre, and I'm sporting two computers, and a bunch of random other techno-gear, which makes me excited.

The giant blue ball under the desk is a prototype I'm working on.

1001 Books to read

2008-05-13T13:11:00.003-04:00

Here's a list of great books one is apparently supposed to have read. Sadly, great non-fiction works are omitted. Here's how I add up:

Book - Author (Reason)

Read:
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk (last year, I think)
Life of Pi – Yann Martel (borrowed from Dad two years ago)
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson (read two years ago, must read again)
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco (read after an undergrad class in Semiotics. Great.)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (all Douglas Adams is excellent. I have read each of three multiple times)
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons (A graphic novel. Excellent.)
Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Finished recently. I tried reading when I was 11, but I was too young and gave up.)
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (in Southeast Asia last summer)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick (read in an anthology a few years ago)
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein (read a few years ago)
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (my favourite novel. ever.)
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (for high school english)
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien (Long, but imaginative. My opinion is mixed on whether books should have multiple appendices.)
Lord of the Flies – William Golding (for high school english)
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (during high school, outside class)
A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift (not sure why this is on the list, as its an essay. But I have read it)
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe (during high school, outside class)
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell (during high school, outside class)
Animal Farm – George Orwell (during high school, outside class)
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien (I think when I was younger than 12)
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (during high school, outside class)
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (for high school english)
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad Defoe (during high school, outside class)
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells (when I was much younger)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain (in Southeast Asia last summer)
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott (Mom gave it to me?)
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (for high school english)

29!

In Progress:
Ulysses – James Joyce

Saw as a movie:
Atonement – Ian McEwan (recent)
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh (twice)
American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis (on David's recommendation)
The Cider House Rules – John Irving (few years ago)
Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally (motivation for Schindler's List, which I saw on Sunday.)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke (I actually really don't like this film. It does nothing new for me and is horribly paced.)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick (Bladerunner)
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak (Mom's favourite movie)
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell (This was playing a few times around the Freeman household in my youth)
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (As the excellent adaptation Apocalypse Now)
Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace (Dad's favourite movie)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo (yay Disney!)

Gave up:
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco (A book profoundly stupid in detail. I realized I wasn't gaining by reading it)

Want to read:

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
Foundation – Isaac Asimov

Originally taken from John August's blog.

Can you copyright a brain?

2008-05-06T21:20:00.005-04:00

I just got back from an interesting (although limited) session on Canadian copyright for artists at Kingston's Artel, which got some mental juices going from something I heard about when I was visiting the Dynamic Graphics Project (where I'm doing my Master's)

There is currently ongoing research in augmenting participant's memory and other cognitive abilities using recording devices, for both Alzheimer's and Autism. From what I have heard, the results of using a recording device is incredibly valuable. In one case where a camera would hang around an Alzheimer's patient's neck and intermittently take pictures throughout the day, memory performance was compared to a control group and the use of a diary. It was found that not only did reviewing the recorded pictures perform better in event recall but that, whereas other memory-recording techniques would fade over time, the use of pictures which were reviewed once ensured that the memories created were permanent. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the original paper to link to.

Now, let's return to copyright. Recently, there has been an unfortunate movement to ban public photography, frequently on the basis of copyright as a guise to prevent terrorism. While I think that this is clearly ridiculous, not to mention simply impractical, it raises the question of where the information is going (and how can we wrangle it!). I mean, should my friend with photographic memory not be allowed out in public, unless she is equipped with some sort of distraction device so she can't concentrate on creating a "copy" of the surroundings? I think we all can agree that we cannot control the existence of a "copy" in a human brains, except perhaps that which falls under a non-disclosure agreement. This is illustrated humorously above in the ingenious xkcd.

So then, if we cannot copyright brain contents, yet we can copyright pictures, then what about the Alzheimer's patients who could use photography to augment their daily lives. In fact, they would not be able to function as normal human beings without it. You could say, then, that the camera is, in fact, an extension of and therefore is a part of their brain and similar laws should apply. I'm on the patient's side.

Weekend Roundup

2008-05-05T12:27:00.002-04:00

This past weekend:

- My best friend Dave came up from Guelph.
- I volunteered for Admitted Students Day at Queen's.
- I saw Iron Man with Dave, and my other friend Daniel and housemate Jack.
- Visited Free Comic Books Day, saw nothing I really liked.
- Watched three famous movies I had not seen before: Shawshank Redemption, Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock and Amadeus.
- Started playing with some Image Processing stuff on paper.
- Went for a bike ride.
- Had a recording session for the radio play I'm in.

Generally, I had a pretty sweet weekend. Let there be more!

Improv Show Videos

2008-04-27T19:00:00.003-04:00

For The Improv Show's last gig on April 14th, I managed to record both our longform and the jam. The Jam is our half-cast, half-audience thing whose format I nabbed from Upright Citizen's Brigade in New York. I've youtubed it for the loyal fans who missed it.

Here's the longform:

Here's the jam:

I broke 50 kilometers!

2008-04-21T13:02:00.001-04:00

I just got back from a 54 k bike ride!

Here's the google map.

View Larger Map

Now, my average speed sport of sucks, as it took over two hours, but that can be improved. I think I'll need to buy a bike clock.

Massive Life Update

2008-04-20T17:48:00.002-04:00

In the last month, I:
- got an Iron Ring
- finished my last exam in the Mathematics and Engineering Program at Queen's
- was accepted for a Master's in Computer Science with the Dynamic Graphics Project at the University of Toronto, where I'm hoping to focus on Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing.

Phew! Post-graduation, I was also looking into the Master's of Digital Media program in Vancouver, but decided I wanted to follow a more academic route. After lots of soul-searching, I realized I'm more of a researcher than a business guy, and if I continue to follow the academic stream I get to keep teaching! My specific research interests are pretty fuzzy right now, but the advisory possibilities at UofT are really fantastic and fluid. More on that to come.

So this means I only have four months left in Kingston, the city I was born in and have lived for the past 11 years, after stints in Calgary and Vancouver. Although Kingston has its own funny hijinks, it's going to be weird to leave this quaint place for the big smoke. I'm really looking forward to Toronto's theatre scene though - I know that I'm going to keep doing improv and theatre wherever I go.

This summer, I will be working in the Human Media Lab on 3D videoconferencing from multiple 2D capture (details to come), but that's pretty much all I've planned for now. On Thursday, I wrote down a very broad summer to-do list:

Buy a guitar and start learning stuff on it
Buy a camera
Write a play or short story
Buy a laptop and get it all pimped up
Buy an OLPC XO and learn how to program on it.
Have sex outdoors
Read Ulysses
Finish Godel Escher Bach
Learn about Information Theory
Be on stage at least once
Learn about Decentralized Control Theory
Bike greater than 50 km in one day
Buy/Fix my bike
Get glasses (my old ones broke)
Find a house in Toronto

And then on Friday, I went on a bike for 35 km! Maybe I'll have to increase that goal. I'll keep you posted.

ps. playing through Bioshock now. Despite it's flaws, its pretty awesome.

Rock Paper Scissors is live!

2008-03-23T12:09:00.004-04:00

After some helpful comments, Rock Paper Scissors Infinity is now live!

Rock Paper Scissors Infinity is a massively multiplayer matching game. Honestly, the best way to experience it is to just go look at it. And play with it, so it grows, of course.

From the about page:

By playing this massively multiplayer game, you are creating a huge network of verb-noun-verb connections. If someone tries to add a "play" or "connection" that already exists, then that connection is strengthened. The strongest connections are listed on the infinity page.
As people add more and more connections (as n goes to infinity) then this network will begin to resemble human understanding. Or maybe that's just a crazy idea. I'm probably wrong.
In only the short time I've had this online, I've already learned a ton from the people who have "played" it. Please, look around, play, don't be afraid to break the rules I've made.
- Dustin

So do it! Play around!

Real-Life Spam

2008-03-12T12:42:00.002-04:00

Well, the house just received 30 identical looking standard-size envelopes, none of which were addressed to any of us. Most of them were weird variations of either Phillip Van Stone (18) or Andrew Collins (9). I opened one for "Mike ColinManing", which I assumed I couldn't get prosecuted for since it obviously wasn't a real person. It was an invitation to some $20,000 tournament (for which we had OBVIOUSLY already been considered) at PartyPoker.com. Below is a scan of all of the Phillip Van Stone variations:

Blobjects are fun!

2008-03-06T22:44:00.002-05:00

Blobject? A photo from a research project I'm working on.

City 7: Toronto Conflict Reactions

2008-02-25T22:18:00.004-05:00

I've had the install file for City 7: Toronto Conflict sitting on my desktop for a long time, but I've been too lazy to install it. So, here it is. It's a mod for Half-Life 2 that represents an alternate timeline where, at the beginning of the game, Gordon Freeman gets teleported to Toronto (City 7) instead of Half Life 2's City 17. I played the game for an hour (so far) and I've recorded my reaction's, a la Games for Lunch. So here's my stream-of-consciousness thoughts:

- sweet, the first two minutes are exactly like in Half Life 2.

- I've teleported, and someone says he recognizes me, then runs off. Odd. I definitely get a "Valve" feel from this. Good job team. I definitely had low expectations, as I thought it would just be an excersize in modeling Toronto's landmarks, which doesn't count as game design at all. It looks like they used the same character models, but used new landmark art with a ton of new voices. Its definitely unnerving to see the trademark Half Life 2 walls next to a Future Shop.

- Holy shit! The parking meters are just like in Kingston. This both increases my immersion and destroys the fourth wall.

- No reaction from the Combine guards when I stand awkwardly in front of them. Darn.

- I tried to get past that pool into what looks like an elusive area. I climbed up onto the fence next to the park and smacked into an invisible wall. That sucks.

- I like that I'm not given any explicit goals in the beginning. Still exploring around is nice and, by the nature of the exploration, equates me with the conventions of this new world without forcing it down my throat. It does help that I'm naturally inquisitive.

- I walked past some guards into an area that was restricted and was instantly plugged full of combine gun energy. A warning would have been nice, like some warning shots at my feet or nose.

- Hmm, still want to get across the pool...in the middle of the pool...uh-oh, sniper lasers...dammit. dammit. First death.

- Restarted. There are humans wandering around, one of them complained about "typical combine maintenance". Ah, some things never change.

- I'm on a roof now. Yay, I found a crowbar! Now what? It occurs to me that I could kill a lone combine and steal his gun, but they all are in the open. I go to the one nearest to the stairs that go up to the roof and smack him a bunch of times. When he dies, he gives me a grenade but I'm still in a smacking frenzy and it goes flying uselessly. The explosion draws about five more combine and I still only have a crowbar, so I run back up to the roof. They don't follow. Maybe some of them will drop a gun, so I try to skirmish out, entice a few and lure them up to the roof, but it isn't happening. They just stay down there, and then mumble something about "losing the target". Lame.

- I try the same thing a few times, doesn't go anywhere. I go to a point on the roof where I can watch a crowd of people. Someone mentions something about "Hank" going nuts. Suddenly, Hank runs out, kills a combine with his pistols and tries to make a run across the pool. Hilarious. Results are similiar to my attempt, but it appears that Hank didn't bother to save his game. So, I guess the designers are telling me that that approach is futile. Or are they? I mean, I DO have an MIT education and I'm wearing a hazardous materials suit.

- I look around, and pick up a filing cabinet (?) to step up onto the roof. It looks like there is an area enclosed by a red fence that I can now reach. I gleefully grab a medkit and hold it (my health is at 100%, but you never know when you may need more) and trounce over to fence, standing directly on top of it. I throw the medkit down so that it lands on the ground inside, and then gleefully smack into another invisible wall. I can't jump down! The medkit sits inside the fence, mocking me. Lame.

- I go into the "restricted" area I went to before and manage to kill about four more combine this time before I bite the dust. I was picking up some health packs I found and managed to stay alive by skirmishing out, killing a combine and taking his grenade, then returning to behind a box as they all shot at me. If only they clumped so I could take them out all at once, but it looks like I'm not that lucky.

- Wait? What is that on top of those discarded(?) train cars? A generic supply crate? Goody!

- I manage, with some difficult box-moving maneuvers, to get a box on top of another box to get on top of the crate. Somehow, though I'm most likely making a racket and looking like a moron, the combine ignore me. This is pretty odd, considering that they seem to keep a tight control on the other humans.

(Oh yeah, I forgot to mention all the rations humour. Hilarious)

- I got to the top! I gleefully bash open the crate to find...no guns. Its some energy batteries for my suit. Well, now my health totals 170 or so. Now should I make a run for it?

- I turn on the sprint and race through the crowd of combine and people to cross the pool. Somehow, I avoid sniper fire and fly up a staircase and wham, into a door which is clearly non-interactive due to its pixelation. I get swarmed by about 5 combine, and its game over again.

Verdict: I'm looking forward to keep playing this, considering that its design strategy closely follows Valve's, which is superb. The jury is still out on whether or not the goals should have been clearer.

Also, "Enter the Mind"? Lame! What am I, twenty? I need to change that.

Thoughts on the Audience

2008-02-18T20:47:00.001-05:00

It looks like several "artists" I've been following for a while have come together and created something. I'll have to keep tabs on this:

thoughts on the audience

A hint of things to come...

2008-02-08T19:08:00.000-05:00

Here's a preview of a project I'm finishing up.

Psychosomnium

2008-02-02T18:09:00.000-05:00

Wow. I just played another excellent example of platformer turned into a compelling mind-fuck indie game. Playable here.

UPDATE: I didn't really emphasize enough how important it is that you play this game, like right now. It questioned my meaning of existence, and its ending left me shocked for a long time afterwards. Please, please play it. And then comment here.

A collection of ideas #1

2008-01-28T13:29:00.000-05:00

Think Fast...

New Improv Game:Sit, Stand, Heart Attack
Essentially after Sit/Stand/Lean or Sit/Stand/Lie Down, but one person must always be having a heart attack. Haven't tried it out yet, but it should be hilarious.

Optimus Prime with no legs...Pessimus Prime

A biker gang made out of mathematicians...Hell's Angles

A special wish

2008-01-23T12:58:00.000-05:00

After a few months of limping along with a degrading phone, I finally replaced my loyal LG 6070 with a ass-kicking Blackberry Pearl. I mean, just look at that wicked flash website! Anyway, the main point of interface with the Blackberry Pearl is the beautiful, backlit trackball (my friends have affectionately called it the Blackberry Clit - it just demands to be touched). I love it - it makes moving through menus so fast.

However, I got an idea the other day when stumbling on the fact that I can use Bluetooth to connect my Pearl random laptops nearby. Could someone PLEASE write some code so that I can connect by Bluetooth to a laptop, then take my Pearl and turn it UPSIDE DOWN so that it effectively becomes a wireless mouse? Left-clicking would be equivalent to pushing the Pearl down so the trackball "clicks" in, and right-clicking could be automatically assigned to one of the three buttons adorning the side of the pearl. Or, if you're a Human-Computer Interaction snob then you have a Mac and don't need right-clicking.

Please, someone make my day!

What's on your mind?

2008-01-22T22:20:00.000-05:00

Earlier today, I recorded for an art project with a student in the Queen's film department. I'm not going to give up too much, since it's going to be on display in mid-February. For the project, I had to sit in a room by myself and a camera recorded me for fifteen straight minutes, and I was directed to speak about whatever I wanted.

Well, it turned out that I spent most of my time talking about house cleaning. Yes, despite the oodles of creativity I'm supposed to have, I had an imaginary conversation about cleaning my house. I guess this really shows what's on my mind.

Realtime Art Manifesto

2008-01-21T20:50:00.000-05:00

I just read the Realtime Art Manifesto. It is one of those documents I'll obviously have to read again, preferably out loud, with lots of Guinness running through my bloodstream.

I just discovered a new term!

2008-01-16T13:11:00.000-05:00

It's CSCW - Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Sweet.

Cognitive Dissonance

2007-12-26T12:27:00.000-05:00

Whenever we interact with a thing, be it animal, vegetable, human or other, we form, by trial-and-error, a certain agreeement on the meaning of the symbols we use.

This may be anything from the words that compose a language, to the motions we tell our limbs to perform to keep us walking. When the literacy level in the language of the speaker and listener is high enough, poetry and dance are possible. However, this is only really possible if the basic rules and grammar of the language are agreed on.

This is really all about me being angry at the buttons on my cellphone. The buttons are labelled "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "*", "0", "#". Usually, I use these buttons to type in a certain number of a certain friend's phone that I want to call at the very moment. Then, I press the send key. But, my phone and I have a few more things we talk about:

"*" also means I want to put my phone in vibrate mode.
"0" sometimes means means "I'm tired of navigating through a stupid menu system and want to talk to a human being"
"1" sometimes means "I want to speak in English, not French"
"7" sometimes means "I want to delete the message"

Curiously, written directly onto the buttons in smaller writing are strings of leters, such as "MNO" on the "6" and "WXYZ" on "9". I've come to find that they don't actually mean the entire string, but only a few letters at a time.

I text message my friends alot since with my cellphone plan it's free and often I only need to let themknow of things without having an entire conversation. When I'm text messaging, I need to communicate in the English alphabet. For "5", also labelled "JKL", I can get three different things (actually four, if you include 5 itself):
5 = J
55 = K
555 = L
5555 = 5
55555 = J (again)

so, if I wanted to text message "Im coming", it would be entered as:

"4446#222666[wait a second]6444664444"

I pressed "4" too many times the last time, so I had to go all the way around again. This is the way I'm used to doing things

However, something I also do often is looking up people's extension numbers in automated telephone directories. At some point in the automated menu system (when I haven't gotten annoyed enough to press "0" yet) I'll hear "Please enter the first three letters of the person's last name." Whereupon if I want to speak to someone with the last name "Bergeron", I'll enter the ridiculous string of numbers:

"2233777"

By the first "7", the system is usually yelling back at me that it doesn't understand me. The system expected me to enter "237", and then it would run some sort of matching algorithm. The predicament gets worse when I type in a number too many times and I automatically go all the way around again, making the system yell at me even more. This is dissonance - we had this well agreed-upon language that suddenly ceases to be, and now I don't trust my phone.

I've recently been playing Indigo Prophecy - a "game" that the French creator billed as an "interactive movie." The interactive story elements are pretty awesome, and you can change characters while wandering through the story's world to hear their perspective, which can actually change the course of the story. Unfortunately, during combat or action scenes it switches to what is called "Shenmue-style" button matching sequences, meaning I need to stop paying attention to what is actually going on on the screen and I switch to paying attention to little green, red, yellow or blue lights that show which buttons I need to mash on the keyboard to do "Great!" in the sequence. This is stupid. After a total of 10 hours of play or so, they've built up absolutely no meaning to me. I honestly cannot say that "blue" differs any way from "green". It just absolutely has no meaning for me. I don't care. I mean, sometimes when me characters need to dodge left, then the green buttons light up (which happen to be of the left side of the screen), but honestly I don't care. I've almost taken to giving up the game because these actions sequence frequently end in failure and in no way add to the enjoyment of the game. Please people, be aware of the learning potential of languages. Otherwise, the game's pretty awesome and packs some real cajones.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all!

Queen's Professor compares video games to cocaine

2007-12-17T23:08:00.000-05:00

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=165016

Wow. I'll think up a more thorough response to this later. But in the meantime:

- The most advanced game the author ever played is Tetris, which somehow gives him license to condemn the entire medium.

- Video games are NOT passive in any way! Sure, they leave less to the imagination than books do, but they open out into another dimension (gameplay). Unless, however, they are designed in what Jonathan Blow calls "unethically". They do not deserve to be grouped with TV or movies, which consume less energy, both physically and mentally.

- Over-indulgence in anything is unhealthy (except Jesus). Moderation is your responsibility, just as with food and alcohol and anything else.

Narrative and Fido

2007-12-06T16:53:00.000-05:00

Two nights ago, I watched Fido, a 2006 Canadian zombie film, with my housemate John. This post is about narrative and exposition in that movie, which is definitively the best Canadian movie I've ever seen (if you ignore the bilingualism of Bon Cop Bad Cop). Here's the trailer:

If you're going to see the movie, stop reading now! There isn't a twist as part of the central plot, but I'm going to talk about some of the narrative choices that the director made that I thought were interesting.

The movie takes place in an alternate 1950s era where, a few decades before, the Earth passed through a "radiation cloud", so that now any human that dies becomes reanimated as a flesh-hungry zombie. This is an important difference from styles of zombies seen in other films - when you die, everyone becomes a zombie. In fact, during a funeral the deceased's heads are buried seperately (in "headcoffins") from their bodies so they don't reanimate. The second major difference is that a corporation, ZomCon, has invented a collar that, when activated, can control a zombie's urges. So, a menial labour force of zombies exists, with "normal" families having anywhere from one to six. As you can guess, its a comedy.

The main story starts when a single-child family gets a zombie servant. The young boy, Timmy, is generally neglected by his parents, especially his emotionally distant farther, and bullied at school. It's the commonly seen lonely-young-boy syndrome. He befriends the new zombie quickly, who he names Fido. Naturally, shit starts going wrong. The collars are hilariously prone to being knocked off or deactivated, and quickly the old creepy lady in the neighbourhood, Mrs. Henderson, is killed by the zombie when he gets loose. Timmy has to kill her when she reanimates, and he buries her in the public garden. Again, hilarious. Later, bullies kidnap Timmy and tie him to a tree. They then deactivate Fido's collar, hoping that he will eat Timmy. Contrary to their plan, Fido actually shows self-control and goes after the bullies. With the bullies dead, but not for long, Fido tries to untie Timmy's rope but lacks the motor control. He runs (limps) to fetchs Timmy's mom, who gets there just in time to shoot the zombified bullies. Yet again, hilarious. The comedy of Fido, played by Billy Connolly, showing his restraint from eating Timmy's mom, played by Carrie-Anne Moss, is subtle and delicious.

Anyway, eventually the emotionless father gets shot by accident and Fido becomes the more emotionally-engaged father figure at the end of the movie.

What I was getting to is that the movie makes several narrative jumps and large chunks of the story are evidently missing. First, there is a certain tension between the father and Fido, but suddenly one day the zombie is sent away. Later, Fido and Timmy are together in a field (just before the bullies scene) with no reason for them being there. I found myself asking things like "What? When was the decision made to send the zombie away?" and "Where did they go? Why are they there?" Maybe I'm slightly more harsh than your average film watcher, but I found the jumps a little surprising. It turns out later when I was watching the deleted scenes on the DVD that the lead up to these important moments is explained in full. However, the director, Andrew Currie, said in the commentary that he felt that these parts were boring and didn't add to the narrative. Well, you know what, I watched the scenes and they were boring. Had I the choice of including them in the film and having a well-explained plot versus the film as-is with the more punchy narrative flow, I would take the latter. The two events that I mentioned weren't out of the ordinary with the film's universe at that point at all. So, miniature revelation for myself. Film is about expositing interactions between people, it's not about fact-checking.

And games get in trouble for having no plot. Pffft. (I had to bring it back to that)

Encroaching Automata (but, you know, in a good way)

2007-12-02T23:13:00.000-05:00

Holy wow, Google Reader is now making recommendations.

Wow

2007-11-26T22:24:00.000-05:00

Animal Crossing

FAMINE

2007-11-08T15:00:00.000-05:00

If you're in and around Kingston in the coming weeks, be sure to check out Famine, the show I'm producing for Single Thread Theatre Company. It's been one of the reasons why this blog has been so quiet, and I can say that it was well worth it.

The show run is November 14th - 24th. If you want tickets, you can get them online at the Grand Theatre Box Office. Click here for the online store.

Crunch Time

2007-11-02T16:16:00.000-04:00

Yeah, crunching for another project right now. In the meantime, look at this.

Some boardwork

2007-10-28T16:14:00.000-04:00

There's a lot of advantages to having a massive chalkboard in my house. One is the quenching of my large writable space fetishism. Another is being able to work on my thesis and a set design at the same time.

Image processing algorithm design for my thesis on the left, set design scribbles for the opera on the right.

A few weeks spent underwater

2007-10-15T21:10:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I've updated this blog. I'm sort of beginning to wonder what the purpose of it. The last few posts have been all over the map. Am I using this to disseminate things I find cool? Am I using this for commentary or musings? I'd like to use if for all of the above, but it may be time to consider a serious design change.

Every once in a while, I make a consciously drastic change in my daily life. This may be anything from forcing myself to sing in the shower in the morning, or moving my furniture around to a very different configurations. I find this forces me actively adapt to new situations, so I never actually settle into unproductive habits. I'm beginning to think I need to re-think this blog in the same manner. Another problem is that most of my casual updating about my life (with pictures!) now happens over the almighty facebook.

These last two months have been busy. Oh man oh man oh man. I'm so anxious to finish up this undergrad degree it hurts. I've also been on a school hunt. After an especially good find while I was in Vancouver, I've decided to broaden my horizons and look around a little. I'll likely apply to many places, but several factors may influence my final choice. I've also been doing Improv, producing a show and finishing up my degree. This has left me pretty lacking in new interpersonal relationships, although I have to say that the people I'm living with are amazing (sorry, there's no actual link there).

I've managed to play Halo 3, Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal during the wee hours of the night after I've been mentally capable of doing schoolwork. My reading has been lacking lately, although I've managed to organize the giant list of rss feeds I read into Google Reader. I currently read 62, some of which are more news-oriented, some are less serious, and some are rants or laments on the nature of game design. I've taken to watching video of the latest Johnathan Blow speeches while doing laundry or relatively boring homework, too.

Somewhere in here I have a list of art projects to finish. Some involve flash, some involve the internet, some involve text. As usual, thanks for reading and I promise to bring some more coherence to this space in the near future.

Neuroticism is optimal?

2007-10-08T14:53:00.000-04:00

I just read this article:

Neurotic software has winning personality

Austrian researchers made several different AI classes (agressive, defensive, normal and neurotic) and pitted them against a real-time strategy game's built-in AI engine. Turns out the neurotic AI was the most successful of them all

In other news,

Lately I've been watching a lot of Johnathan Blow's speeches, where he often mentions "unethical gameplay" (article). He defines unethical gameplay, in one specific case, as designing a game with "rewards" built in. So, the user keeps playing a game for these moments of reward (cutscenes could be one example) while the underlying gameplay is crappy or uninteresting. He says that the play that results from the game should be interesting in of itself, not because of the "rewards" that the game doles out.

Both of these items are interesting to me. While the majority jury is out on whether violent games cause violence (I don't think so) I am of the belief that the cognitive structure of a game has a significant effect, in the short term at least, on how you behave. After playing a few hours of the Thief series, I find I always stick to the shadows in real-life for a while afterwards. After playing a "twitch"-style casual game for 15 minutes, I have a little trouble concentrating and feel hyper afterwards. But these are always short-term effects. The violence in videogames is different because it is representational. I'm not going to get deep into this right now, but you aren't actually ACTING violent, you are DOING violent things. If you're doing them with a friend, such as completing Halo 3 on Legendary (me and my housemate yesterday) then the primary behavior that is being encouraged is cooperation.

So, if game designers want to design ethically, they should think of the type of personality that a game encourages. Cool.

Passed Around

2007-09-30T23:45:00.000-04:00

I finally got this pay slip in the mail, after it was passed around for several weeks in Queen's internal mail system. I thought I'd capture it here; it represents my educational experience with shocking accuracy. The "experience" is coming to a close, and there's really only 7 months left for me at Queen's.

This September has been really busy, so I've been relatively silent here. The first Improv Show in several months was last night at Wellington St. Theatre, and it was great to get back on stage again.

Keep watching, fans.

Coming up this week...

2007-08-31T07:54:00.000-04:00

In 12 hours I'm going to be getting on a flight to Vancouver. This is my final hurrah of the summer, the final tiny bit of adventure I get in before school starts up again.

In Vancouver the agenda is pretty thick with Game Design and Digital Media schools to check out. I've got five on my list in the space of three days.

I had already booked my return flight, with the intention of coming back on Sept 6th. However, my Vancouver friend gave me an offer I couldn't refuse: in exchange for a free place to stay, he and I will tag-team drive his car back, and see how close we can cut it to 40 hours. Here's a picture of our route:

Apparently the quickest way is through the States. We aren't stopping, and are going to try to drive in alternating 6-hour shifts. Oh man oh man oh man. I've heard alot of doubt as to whether we can do it in 40 hours, although I had somebody quote 36 hours to me yesterday as the amount of time it should take.

I'll keep all y'all posted.

...all part of a complete writing session

2007-08-16T23:11:00.000-04:00

Paper pad, Bic pen, a hearty stout and a patio.

A concise illustration of the relationships in virtual worlds

2007-08-14T14:26:00.000-04:00

Finally, womanly slapping as a gameplay element

2007-08-12T13:37:00.000-04:00

LINK to Rose Camellia

The plot of the game follows Rose, a low-born widow of the eldest son of a noble family who was only married yesterday. She must defend her stake to the family mansion by slapping every female in her way. Fantastic! The gameplay is entirely controlled by mouse-tracing, so you literally are dragging your mouse across the other character's face to attack, and then across your own back to evade. Here's a few screenshots:

Nelly's Ride Wit Me

2007-08-11T16:01:00.000-04:00

Back in Grade 11, a few friends and I innocently made a music video cover of Nelly's Ride Wit Me. We really weren't seeking artistic integrity at the time, just seeing what we could do with some video editing and shooting. Also, one of the guys I was working with was incredibly rich (as as example, we once asked his neighbor if we could use his Mercedes in the shoot, to which he replied "Which one?") so we could actually have some nice cars, etc. Well, we made the video and a year or so ago I posted it on youtube. The rest, they say, is history.

For whatever undecipherable reason, using the youtube search algorithm with the search string "Ride Wit Me" brings our video in at 6th. Because of this strange gift, at the time of this writing, the video itself has attracted over 30,000 views and 64 comments.

I think some of these comments are good examples of the backwaters of internet culture. Here's a few choice examples:

ceeceegurl8735 (1 week ago)
lol. da part with da dog wuz funny. great video

beckerfanboy27 (1 month ago)
WIGGER OMG

t1cTacJ0e (2 months ago)
without disrespecting you lads, the only thing that makes this video watchable was the song, however god acting and shit. stay brutal \m/

Mortadaissexy (3 months ago)
Wigger 100 %

aznbabieloser (3 months ago)
yo you guys suck plz stop posting shit

aracid (3 months ago)
The video wasn't interesting. That's all I can say. I can see most of your commenters are very immature and ignorant with their words, but not interesting is what they basically mean.

crazywhiteb0y11 (4 months ago)
these bitches are gay they dont got no girls
wtf vid dont got bitches

Djurovic90 (4 months ago)
bullshit of video!!!stupid american pussis!

armendtje (5 months ago)
where them girls at? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA nerds

snl4life15 (5 months ago)
you need to learn the difference between fact and racism "brotha". they were corny and they were white, if they were f@#kin orange i would have said stupid orange boyz,so keelo stop trying to assume some one is a racist against some corny white boyz if you dont know them. u calm down

killo11 (5 months ago)
the term "white boyz" is no different than the "n"-word.
they're both racial comments and are not acceptable in modern society.

gameking50P (5 months ago)
what the fuck is this, its just a bunch of white guys flashing how rich the r compared to black ppl

MrMarijuanaMan (10 months ago)
...fake chains...fake clothes... no ladys just weiners...the only thing you did right was say "im a failure"...

O-SNAP! forces me to learn

2007-08-07T18:30:00.001-04:00

I just started applying for OSAP for the fourth year in a row. The last few years, its just been a series of clicks through all the documentation and then on to the "give me money phase" (some paraphrasing here) but it looks like this year, for each portion of the legalese, there is a short multiple-choice quiz on what the legalese actually says. Initially, I find this incredibly annoying, but its nice that I'm actually being forced to read the fine print on what I'm signing up for.

If only they'd do this with EULAs....

Bubbles!

2007-07-30T12:39:00.000-04:00

Daft Hands

2007-07-28T14:08:00.000-04:00

Holy Crap!

UPDATE: Oh shit! A parody! Again, hilarious

UPDATE 2: Oh shit! More! I'll never understand the relationship with some people and their pets.

I want 10

2007-07-25T18:04:00.000-04:00

When I saw Jason (my high-ranked Telus salesman/karaoke friend) in Toronto this past weekend, he had taken a screenshot of an iPhone display and made it the background of his regular phone. I dropped to my knees involuntarily, fooled temporarily and praising him as a god.

In related news,

Games and Education

2007-07-24T11:23:00.000-04:00

The link below is to "Statetris", a game where you play tetris with the States of America. After playing it for about 3 minutes, I think I've learned more about the geography of the states than in my previous 22 years of life. Awesome!

http://www.mapmsg.com/games/statetris/usa/

Quagmire

2007-07-19T18:17:00.000-04:00

I'm stuck here.

I'm looking exhaustively at school programs for next year, specifically game design program. I have a little .txt file I keep full of all of them, and one has really caught my eye. It's the Vancouver Film School Game Design Program. It's a twelve-month intensive program, where I drop $29,000 to have myself shoved into the gaming world. It's exciting me a little too much, and I'm scared.

I mean, something I could have wanted very badly could become true, suddenly, with very little preparation or thought. There are two alternatives here:

One

The slow, easy, careful route. I take another computer science degree, maybe 2-4 years or something. Talk my way into a few jobs. Build some experience. Or, I could even try to start in Q&A right after this degree. Move to some a major centre first, and see what I can do.

Two

VFS. My still-bloodied fetus being shot out into the games industry still crying and screaming and wide-eyed, unable to crawl.

<too much information>

Anecdotally, the way I was actually born was only my head popping out first. I then apparently looked around the room without any crying, taking it all in. Then, after a short pause, the rest of me came out. This came to my knowledge through an awkward conversation with my mother.

</too much information>

At some point, I want to be able to pursue game design from an academic standpoint, and I'm afraid that charging head-long into the industry, with only a superficial game-oriented education will limit me in that respect. I've been thinking alot about it, and jeff orkin seems to have done it right. He's an academic primarily who consults on some wicked games, like F.E.A.R., for example. Oh, and if you read this blog you should check out his "The Restaurant Game Project". He's trying to mine several gameplay experiences to create an AI. That's a really bad explanation - just check it out.

I geuss I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Giggity giggity.

Wii!!!!!

2007-07-15T23:04:00.000-04:00

I just got back home from my glorious friend Ryan's house, where he introduced me to the Wii. Thus, I shall expound on it.

We played Wii Sports, as he didn't have any other two-player games, so keep in mind this is only reflective of Wii Sports on the Wii, not any other title.

After the first 10 minutes of "Holy shit! The pointer turns UPSIDE DOWN when I turn my hand UPSIDE DOWN!" and "Ahhh! It moves like me!" I got into the groove, while still being pretty damn excited. This console has a ton of potential, provided the design is done well. Ryan said that golf sucked, so we stuck to bowling, tennis, boxing and baseball. Overall, I prefer boxing or tennis, although I'm much better at boxing. Ryan likes baseball. I was struck hard at the intuitiveness of the game. Some things had to be taught, like in baseball you press certain buttons to pitch the ball particular ways. I loved how intuitive tennis felt, when your character moved around for you and all you had to do was swing the racket. In boxing, I think I felt more in control than I have in any game. However, there's no point in ranting how awesome it is, because I could go on and on.

Criticism:

There is, quite obviously, so much under-potential here. I began to notice that, while it seems like the characters are following your exact moves, they actually determine what type of move you are doing, and use that instead. For example, in baseball, a twitch will do instead of a full-fledged swing. I also noticed that during tennis, after sweating my ass off while swinging the Wiimote left and right, Ryan told me to calm down and just twitch my hand. Sure enough, twitching does it. It actually doesn't even matter which way you twitch your hand. The timing is more important than direction. Bowling got boring rather fast for more, but I'm not a bowler anyway. During boxing, I actually won 8 AI matches in a row, propelling my Mii's skill level up higher and higher. When the crowd cheered, I would raise my hands up high, but my avatar did not respond. How cool would it have been if it had raised its hand too, and the crowd had cheered louder? When you win a round, there's some deliciously funky music that comes on as the camera pans around your avatar. The music just DEMANDS dancing, but the avatar only responds by lamedly continuing to punch. I want to fucking dance! Why put dance music in there, and not let me dance? WHY?!

All in all, a great title for some quick fun, especially for non-gamers. I can see its just BARELY scratching the surface, though.

Now, I clearly haven't see that many Wii games come out, but I do hope that they continue to be well designed. Hopefully, the direct accelerometer data from the Wiimote comes straight into gameplay, not a simplified version. In my opinion, bastardizing such a beautiful wealth of real-world mineable data is, really, a huge waste. One can only dream.

Movie Sets and the World

2007-07-14T20:00:00.000-04:00

I read very quickly. In fact, I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in the last two days.

I really like these books. They are nice and imaginative, but I find myself getting frustrated with the details. Like how the book seems like a movie set, and not a world. A movie set is one push on a poorly-supported flat away from being exposed as virtual. While I can appreciate that the story is good, I keep finding myself asking questions that seem to make the world inconsistent. A few examples:

- The ministry arrested an innocent person who was under the Imperius curse in this book and put them in Azkaban. However, when Sirius was in Azkaban he was able to escape because he was innocent.

- The books are very Britain centric. I rarely hear a reference to the outside world. As Voldemort is gaining power, you'd think they would bring in Aurors from the outside, but this isn't even considered or mentioning. In fact, we have no idea what goes on in the international wizarding community, or if all the wizards are mentioned.

- Cornelius Fudge talking to the Muggle Prime Minister was the only time we've heard of Muggles. Are muggles generally ignored? There can't be that many wizards compared to normal people.

- The book is also very Harry/Ron/Hermoine centric. It almost seems like they are the only character who are conscious, or whose decision processes we see. Nothing really happens, and I'm exaggerating here, without their thought or intervention.

It's not that I have trouble with accepting wizards - it is because I can, rather easily, ask questions about the world that make it look inconsistent. A book that is good at avoiding this is Perdido Street Station. It can be classified as "really fucking weird", mentioning thaumaturgy (magic), vodanyoi (human-sized sentient frogs), crisis energy and elyctrons in the same sentence. However, the world for all its un-Earthness seems to be real. It doesn't seem to be a film set that is just constructed to lead us around some plot points.

But maybe that's the point of Perdido Street Station, as opposed to the Harry Potter books.

Self-Referential Multiple Choice

2007-07-12T14:55:00.000-04:00

I'm currently writing a multiple choice placement test for engineering calculus students. I wrote a draft, and sent it in to the professor I'm working for, where he found an error in this question.

Which statement is correct about the f(x) and its inverse, g(x)?

1. g(x) is the reciprocal of f(x)
2. An output so that g(x) = - f(x)
3. g(f(x)) = x
4. g(x) undoes the action of f(x)
5. 3 and 4
6. I don’t know

Have you spotted the problem?

In the question, #3 is right, #4 is right and so is #5. Or is it? The choice #5 doesn't say that it itself is right. #5 needs to state this fact, given that it isn't talking about statements about calculus, it is talking about statements which may or may not be true.

I'm reading too much Godel Escher Bach.

What I'm reading right now

2007-07-09T12:45:00.000-04:00

In light of yesterday's post on the newest book I've got, I'm going to reveal what Dustin's reading on a regular basis. I'm actually a ways off from breaking into Second Person - I have several books to go through before that.

Usually, for books, I have one fiction and one non-fiction going at the same time. For the last few months, I have been wading through Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Don't get me wrong, its a great book, but it is hard for me to digest. For fiction, I just finished reading Perdido St. Station, by China Mieville, and now I'm into Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. These two books are great. Perdido Street Station is fantastically imaginative, and Haunted is deliciously weird.

I constantly keep a list of books, movies and video games I need to play through posted on my bulletin board, numbering about 20 each. Sometimes on a whim I will go internet shopping and actually go out and buy these things, so they physically end up in the "cue" bookshelf above my desk. Next to me right now is: The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson, Collapse by Jared Diamond, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, AI for Game Developers, The Long Walk and finally, at the bottom, is Second Person. Whew!

I also read graphic novels. I read Y:The Last Man (whenever it comes out. the publish schedule is damn slow) and I'm reading through a friend's 100 Bullets.

With games, I take a similar approach I do to books, except instead of fiction/non-fiction I do casual/non-casual (A non-fiction game is, well, The Internet). I'm playing through Syberia, an adventure game, and Wik and The Fable of Souls (a really innovative arcade name with a stupidly pretentious and misleading title). I'm also playing through an interactive fiction game called Savoir-Faire by Emily Short. It's a parser adventure, very well written with an aristocratic flair. On the cue (ahem, shelf), I have Indigo Prophecy, known for its excellent writing.

As for TV and movies, I almost never schedule my life around TV. Except for Battlestar Galactica, which is between its 3rd and 4th seasons. Usually, I download series, and I just started watching Dexter two days ago. It looks pretty interesting so far, but I'm not sure if it will hold my attention.

Mailroom!

2007-07-06T21:11:00.000-04:00

Holy crap! It's Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media

Peppering of Humour

2007-07-04T14:29:00.001-04:00

Perry Bible Fellowship has been going slowly for the past few months (although I did still check it obsessively while I was in Southeast Asia), so I'm happy to resort to xkcd for my visual endorphin needs.

Sitch Ring

2007-06-28T09:50:00.000-04:00

Since this is almost the third post in this vein, I'm tempting to add a tag on my blog for "news about sitch-like devices". If you haven't heard about the Sitch, it was a device I invented for the purpose of Deviants, a play I wrote and acted in this past spring. The central idea is that it connects one's mind to all other minds (think like a mental internet) and allows for free flow of information, and the ensuing consequences.

Well here's a video where someone has created a Sitch-like device using wikipedia and Second Life:

A Short History of Progress

2007-06-27T13:00:00.000-04:00

Summer of 2004:

I'm bussing downtown at Chez Piggy, leaving me pretty unstimulated intellectually, leading some critics to call this "a rather boring summer."

While trying to cure my boredom, I discover Second Life while surfing on mmorpg.com.

Considering I'm part of a real-life Improv Show, I try starting a team in Second Life. I manage to get about 25 avatars to show up at a meeting of The Thinkers (written about here). The interest was there, but I realized the interface was too awkward to make decent theatre.

School Year 2004-2005:

Nothing relevant. Worked really hard at school.

Summer 2005:

Worked in the ILC on lighting controls that adjusted to ambient daylight. It was pretty lonely, programming on a micro-processor all day.

Went to a virtual book signing in Second Life for a book by blogger Cory Doctorow.

School Year 2005-2006:

I was part of a collaborative playwriting project, and hired to organize/summarive/concentrate all the creative input. I came upon the idea of using this blog as a way for everyone to see and comment on my summaries. Almost by accident, we starting writing the play here, most of which was retained when it was actually performed (pdf).

Summer 2006:

I work for a professor in the Mathematics Department by performing MATLAB simulations of electrons in metal lattices, to help better understand high-temperature superconductivity. (no website anymore) This was a little less lonely, because I had another student I was working with.

School Year 2006-2007:

I was hired as a Teaching Assistant for APSC 171 and APSC 172, which I found incredibly rewarding. I ran one 50-student tutorial per week.

Summer 2007:

I threw the chance of getting another cushy four-month job to the wind, and travelled Southeast Asia for six weeks, making for a great start to the summer. When I returned to Kingston, I was a little depressed when waking up in the morning didn't mean I would learn a bit of a new language that day, and that I was jobless.

Yesterday:

I was hired by Professor Leo Jonker to work on a project for the rest of the summer, developing an online supplementary calculus course for students who have not had sufficient calculus in high school.

While looking into the job before he hired me, he went to the Emerging Technology Centre at Queen's University, who suggested that one of the ways he could teach calculus was to use Second Life (wikipedia link this time). That's full circle.

While I probably won't be using Second Life, I do have some crazy ideas coming, and this is bound to be the Best Job Yet.

All Quiet on the Home Front

2007-06-25T11:50:00.000-04:00

I know I've been pretty quiet since I got back from the amazing trip. I've been job searching, which is, for me at least, one of the most stressful activities in the world. Anyway, I may be two inches away from securing something but I can't be really happy until that happens.

Well, I noticed this story recently, combining many things I'm a fan of: Second Life, Richard Dawkins and questions of "reality".

Also, happy birthday to mom.

Psssstthhh!

2007-06-04T08:37:00.000-04:00

I know I'm supposed to be in Southeast Asia right now, but The Escapist has a great four-part article by Warren Spector (Deus Ex, Thief, Wing Commander, etc.) on Storytelling in games.

link.

Gone to Southeast Asia

2007-04-27T23:30:00.000-04:00

From May 1st - June 10th, I'm gone backpacking across Southeast Asia with my friend Taylor. I won't be updating this old place as much, but I will be putting words and pictures (and videos?) on our travel blog, http://ducksonaplane.blogspot.com/

Hot Fuzz versus Adaptation

2007-04-27T14:19:00.000-04:00

I just watched Hot Fuzz again last night in a theatre for the second time in a week. What a great movie on so many different levels.

[SPOILERS]

Halfway through the movie the first time, I suddenly dawned on me the similarities between this movie and Adaptation, another film I'm very much in love with.

Both films play with romanticism (not just with love, but with things that are awesome) and its relation to reality. Both of them are extremely post-modern, although in different ways. The thing that Really Got It For Me in Hot Fuzz was when Nicholas Angel (the main character and conservative supercop) returned back to the village of Sandford after being exiled and supposedly murdered by Danny, his partner. This strikes exactly the same to me as the "hollywood ending" that appears and becomes the ending of Adaptation, provided by Donald Kaufman, the fictional/real screenwriter brother of Charlie Kaufman, who actually exists. The exact moment of the changeover appears to be when Nicholas Angel stops in a coffee shop on his way back to London, and see Keanu Reeve's face on the cover of Point Break staring back at him.

This "split" or changeover makes a few changes in both movies: from plausible to non-plausible, from unromantic to romantic, from tension to release of tension; essentially from regular to awesome. The split appears not just in the actual plot of the movie, but throughout other elements as well. In Adaptation, there is a split personality of Charlie/Donald Kaufman. This is manifested differently in Hot Fuzz - Nicholas Angel is extremely serious, having a lot of experience in the London police force. Also, he only drinks cranberry juice. Danny, however, believes him to be some kind of superhero, asking him, for example, what the best place is in a man's head to shoot if you want it to blow up. Danny believes him to be a very different person from who actually he is, although he becomes that person at the end of the movie. Finally, both films deal with a split between surface reality and actual reality, namely, conspiracies. Conspiracies are convenient plot devices, generally, because they allow a writer to makes sudden changes to a world we, as an audience, had thought that we had already understood the rules for. Anyway, the conspiracy in Adaptation was that the Ghost Orchid was some sort of drug that the indians were teaching Susan Orlean and John LaRoche to extract. Meanwhile, the conspiracy in Hot Fuzz was that the members of the NWA were killing off people in "accidents" whenever they risked Sanford's reputation as a prize-winning quaint small town.

I have to secretly wonder whether Hot Fuzz's writers and lead actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost ever watched Adaptation, and felt the split between reality and fantasy the same way I did. Having just watched their television show Spaced, which is abundant with "fantasy" experiences, I see its a big part of what they do. I'm happy that these two films acknowledge reality one an equal level as they acknowledge fantasy, which plays a huge part in our daily lives.

What I learned in Montreal

2007-04-27T11:13:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday, I took a bus up to a meeting of IGDA Montreal, to one of their casual meetings about the games industry. It was all really interesting, and too hard to sum up here, but here's what I learned:

- Montreal is becoming more and more the Hollywood of Games.
- I have childish writing.
- read realitypanic.com - Jason Della Rocca's blog for info on an ongoing dispute with the lawyer Jack Thompson.
- You can smoke indoors in Montreal if it's wrapped in 100% tobacco paper.
- If you want to be taken seriously, have a business card.
- "Nobody wants just another shiny gun."
"I DO want another shiny gun."
- Chris 'Wombat' Crowell from A2M is one cool creative director badass.
- Everything that ever happens will be as a result of cool people that you meet in college.
- Big studios are getting progressively larger, while really small studios are becoming more abundant.
- The game industry is moving towards a freelance/union model.
- being the only non-French speaker at a table is an awkward position.
- get a French girlfriend in Montreal to force yourself to learn French.

A wicked rhyme I thought up

2007-04-20T14:12:00.001-04:00

Then I hit the pavement, wondering how the rave went.

Bacon's Lover Blog Post #325: on the road

2007-04-19T02:25:00.000-04:00

Fuck I love bacon. Sometimes I get really intense cravings, and I want to be able to just snap my fingers and have bacon rain from the sky (see Perry Bible Fellowship).

I want to eat bacon on with everything. With mustard, with eggs, with cats even.

Are the new viewers gone yet?

I'm on a take-home exam writing binge. Its 2:30 am and I'm in the Oval-shaped computer lab in the ILC all by myself, with three computers logged in under my name. One to write this, another to do MATLAB/Maple work and the third is playing TV shows to keep me alert (I think?).

This image was under the heading "Food Porn":

This helps me get through the day

2007-04-18T15:47:00.001-04:00

How to Direct Good Improv

2007-04-17T13:35:00.000-04:00

I've been the Artistic Director of The Improv Show for nearly a year now, a year fully of very weird, stressful and entertaining experiences. On a regular basis I catch myself wondering what the hell I'm doing, or supposed to do. Directing an improvisation group, especially one as talented and creative as the one I work with, feels a lot more like a gardening than being an architect. Most of what I do consists of tilling the soil, making sure the plants are well-watered and not fighting with each other. I've tried telling plants where or how to grow, but sometimes a new plant will spring up, completely outside my plan and surprising me. I grab that new bud and give it as much water as possible to see what it will bloom into - sometimes nothing, but sometimes a pretty flower.

This summer the group was ancy for new experiences, as usual, and we delved into a type of improvisational theatre called longform (no decent links available, unfortunately). Although I perform with the group, I did a lot more watching than performing in this phase. I made rules for good scenes and wrote them down. Something deep inside me gets excited with new rules, which I thought of as lattices for vines to climb on in the garden. But, in hindsight, they were more like fences that stopped the garden from getting overgrown. We performed our new longform structure a couple of times this summer at Theatre 5, but returned to our regular short comedy improv at the Time to Laugh Comedy Club during the year. We forgot about longform for a while, and had a great run over several months, our last show at the club on March 29th. Alot of people are going away for the summer, including me, so we won't be performing improv in Kingston for a while.

In addition to be AD of the show, I'm also the Head Trainer for the Kingston Improv Games, the regional chapter of a nation-wide tournament that got me started in improv in grade 11. The kids that perform with this group are amazing, by the way, and there will be a "Lucky 13" improv league performing with them for the month of May (see the main page for info). A few weekends ago, I went up to see the National Tournament of the games, and went to a few workshops during the day, including one on longform. At the workshop, I learned a ton about the quintessential format of longform, the Harold, invented by a guy named Del Close. I realized during the workshop that the longform that The Improv Show was performing was too strict. We were, thanks to the rules I had put in place, being forced to perform in a naturalistic, linear style.

...which is what I told the group last Sunday (two days ago). I said we needed to be more abstract. There was disagreement: not having the connections we had agreed upon earlier would lead to shitty stories. I still was not convinced of my side of the argument but demanded we plunge forward anyway.

Without a suggestion, I went on stage, speaking in foreign language, and began to dig in the ground, finding a magic bean that made me grow bigger. I kept happily gabbing away in gibberish, and found another place to dig, and finding nothing. Next, Monica came on and started arguing with me in gibberish. Evidently, it was her property and she was kicking me off. I feigned pain (Note: I'm acting like I'm feigning pain) and began to writhe on the ground. We swept ourselves off the stage.

Mike went up on the stage, filling my role as the digging dwarf, this time speaking in English. Kristin filled Monica's role, and they reinterpreted what we did in their own way.

They swept the stage again, and Matt and Monica were now in a library. Monica playing the archetypal cute ditzy girl, Matt being an inexplicably creepy (librarian?). They played the scene, having nothing happen and drawing out so long as to be almost entertaining tense. Then, Monica's character left the stage. Then, Mike and Kristin entered the stage, playing the scene backwards, but speaking forwards. The dialogue goes a little bit like this:

K: I'm looking for a book.
M: What are you doing here?
K: This is the Ancient History Section, right?
M: Hello?

We swept the stage...

...and talked about what had just happened. It was nice and interesting, reinterpreting each other on stage, but not as entertaining as it could be.
Somewhere in here we had a discussion about what the guys would do if they had boobs, and the girls would do if they had penises. We also discussed puppetry of the penis. I think I said I wanted both for a day or something.

We started another longform without a suggestion.
I went up and started acting as if a reflective window was in front of me (I was adjusting my hair and such), and I was about to knock on a house's door for an important date. Unexpectedly, Mike came up and became my mirror image, just as I was about to enter the door.

Monica answered the door on my side of the house. Seeing the cue, Kristin answered the door on Mike's side. We behaved as perfect mirror images in movement and dialogue, until suddenly we split. Mike became, from my perspective, evil and I became good, too good. Matt also turned up on my side of the house, but only my side. We played out our parts, focus going back and forth from the left and right sides of the stage, and finally came to a conclusion.

The plot of the last longform was intensely complicated. Mike's side was very dark, and mine was extremely go-lucky, until it started turning dark after I suggested Matt should leave. Mike had revealed that he was looking for a serial killer who had come to this house a year ago. Was that person me? It was fantastic. We all had different beliefs about what was going on on the stage. Matt thought he was a vampire, which explained his ridiculous accent and why he could only be seen on one side.

Okay, we were being abstract, but I made it clear to the group that I wanted more. Mike said "the suggestion for this next scene is ABSTRACT." I didn't remember the next scene too well, but I'll have to explain subjectively from my point of view as I experienced it. I was talking about what I wanted with Mike while Kristin and Monica were slow-dancing in the open space...

...until everyone except for me realized the longform had already started. I promptly shut up, and Kristin jumped up and starting yelling into the corner of the stage. Monica stayed in the centre of the stage, saying she was feeling cold. Matt was up there too. I sat offstage in the audience, enraptured in the improvisation. Everyone who went into the stage space brought an idea with them, and I wanted to wait to see them bring something together before I joined in, if it made sense for me to. Matt, Kristin and Monica were listening closely and I began to see a theme emerge. I stepped up to stage right and mimed a door, and kept trying to open it, saying "Hello? Hello?" and trying to look through the people. I repeated this as the stage continued on. Mike came up to stage left, and walked the length of the stage, and reached THROUGH the door for me, pulling me "outside" into the stage space. I started shivering, having realized by this point that the theme was cold and loneliness. Was I right? It really does not matter - it was my contribution to the scene. I sat in the middle of the stage shivering, and everyone surrounded me and rained on me, both physically and with insults. It felt reminiscent of the psychodramas we used the The Time Project. At this point, I don't remember much of the scene, but it ended soon thereafter.

We agreed that that scene was extremely interesting, and we had reached a sufficient level of abstraction to make ourselves happy.

I decided it was time for the group to use a suggestion. On the whiteboard in the room we were using, someone had been studying for anatomy or cell biology or something, so there was a wealth of things to draw from. I picked "skeletal" and...

...went on stage, making the stage a bathroom. I reached under the sink and began to gleefully saw off my arm, cackling to myself. I then took it off the floor as it fell off, and in a series of hilarious movements, I nailed it to the wall. Kristin came in as my wife, and asked what I was doing. The arm became our baby, and she dressed it up and held it. She cut off her finger and drew a face on it. We swept the stage.

Mike and Monica came on. Mike was Monica's psychologist, and they were discussing, to my surprise, me! It turns out Monica was in love with me and had killed Kirstin, hoping my affection would go to her. I had gone on stage right and mimed being on a bus as they were discussing this. As I could tell they were getting to the end of their conversation, I mimed getting off the bus and walked up some stairs. Monica and I bumped together as I was about to walk into the psychologist's door, and had a conversation. I had gotten a prosthetic, and she was still in love with me. Mike and Kristin appeared stage right, standing on chairs and looking down on us. Monica and I faded out, and it appeared that Mike was death, talking to Kristin about us and the beyond. My arm appeared, played by Matt's arm. Kristin said she wanted to take it with her, but Mike told her she had to wait until the rest of it came (I had to die) Kristin felt ready to say goodbye, and traveled off to heaven or wherever with Mike. Matt was left there, in the purgatorial region presumably because the physical arm had rotted away somewhere.

At this point, watching from the audience, I assumed the scene was over. This would have been a good time to end it, were we on a time limit, or not playing Harold, or afraid of what was going to happen next.

Without warning, Mike rushed up on stage and became a hand who suddenly appeared next to Matt. They had a conversation, which made me laugh the hardest of the entire night. They were two purgatorial hands, waiting for the rest of their bodies to die so they could go to heaven. The conversation can't be reproduced here, but it involved a joke about Mike wanting to be held by Matt and then realizing they were both right hands, and Matt said he would do it but he didn't want Mike to think he was "ambidextrous."

We swept the stage after that, and saw that what we were doing was good. I said that they hand play made me think of a satyr play which immediately follows a trilogy of tragedies on traditional greek theatre. We immediately went into another, this time taking the suggestion "rating systems". While I was talking about what I wanted to see in this scene, Monica, Mike and Kristin had gone up..

...and I realized, despite my best efforts, that the scene had already started again without me realizing it. Monica was a living painting, and Mike was going to buy it from Kristin. Monica was a little shocked, but then decided to roll with it. After this went on for a while, I got a meta idea and walked over to stage right, behind Mike and Kristin, and started to complain about the painting of Mike and Kristin rating the painting of Monica that Matt was trying to sell to me. Phew. This went on for longer, when suddenly Mike turned around, acknowledging me.

We swept this...

..and people were wandering the room stretching out. I talked to Mike about the scene we had just done and what he liked about it. He was acting weird, and I could read him until I realized...

...that we were still in the scene.

This process of meta-rating scenes continued, with scenes being pushed back and forth. Once, I was physically pushed into a scene that I had just been rating. I screamed trying to get out. Somewhere in here, we started giving micetro-esque commands
by the people who were rating the scene, under the guise that this would make the scene better. As soon as I was pushed into the scene, Mike said that my arms were cut off and replaced with a lobster and some cotton candy. As a physical actor, this was great fun for me.

...

This sort of thing continued of a long time, with scenes rebelling against their creators and raters, often with bloody consequences.

...

Maryanne showed up late to practice, and we immediately began to rate her entry into out scene, demanding a better story from her. Then, Matt decided to enter as the absent Laura, and suddenly everyone became Laura, then Laura became a swear word....

The workshop finally ended when everyone put a stop to this. One of the memorable lines came from Mike: "Help! I'm trapped in absurdist theatre! I can never stop!"

Look for more improv of this type coming your way.

Hooray!

2007-04-04T07:47:00.001-04:00

Eidos to open games studio in Montreal

This makes my (very early) day.

Sitch featured in The Walrus

2007-04-03T14:04:00.000-04:00

Well, not really, but alot of the ideas are the same.

For those who didnt' see The Deviants, it was a collection of small plays (some of which) I wrote and acted for. One of the plays I wrote was entitled "Sitch": a story of a young woman rebelled against the future world she lived in, and organizing a collection of people to bring it down. The "world" she inhabited was a recent-future version of our society, where technology interconnects everyone to the point of reducing this to zombie-like creatures. The word I used in the play to describe this world was "flat".

Anyway, I just was in Indigo Book downtown and read an article in The Walrus talking about this issue, centred around a Human-Computer Interaction conference in Montreal. Pretty interesting stuff - reading it brought all my ideas rushing back from when I was writing the play almost 6 months ago.

Here is the article (free subscription needed)

One interesting thing the article bring up is that we treat our brains like computers; we expect our brain to memorize a fact or something on one read. I, myself, have to admit to frequent information amnesia. In fact, according to the article, the brain works very hard to forget information so that it only remembers the good stuff. The anecdote from the article is: "Imagine if when you saved a text document and loaded it later you only got back the parts you liked." I had never considered this when writing Sitch; I assumed it would somehow force people to remember everything. It would have been an interesting angle however.

"I'm sorry, the Sitch decided that remembering your anniversary isn't really relevant. Deleted."

Also, in the article detailed the work of some people now to make more suitable information organizers. Now, considering the way I wrote Sitch (Hint: It was a dystopia) I am skeptical, and pretty scared of all of these things. It's even worse when some of the ideas are exactly stuff I thought up (GPS-based reminders, etc.) Scary stuff. Well, at least lots of people are thinking about this issue, and it isn't just one mad scientist (me, from the future).

How can games be Art?

2007-03-31T11:38:00.000-04:00

Whether or not games can be considered art causes a lot of contention.
Article on Gamasutra
Games Are Art
Roger Ebert's article

My opinion, obviously, is that they ARE, for the following reasons:
1. They can be judged as good or bad.
2. They can indirectly express to the user's what is not expressible through direct explanation.
3. They can effect a user's emotional state.
4. They can have subtext, as in more depth that appears on the surface.

(I realized I wrote the above definitions with "observer" initially, and I had to change all those words to "user".)

One of the arguments against games being art, according to Roger Ebert and some others, is that they do not have complete authorial direction; the author does not have complete control over what happens. I guess it seems to him that every time a form of media becomes briefly interactive, then it ceases to be art and briefly becomes something else, becoming art again once the interaction phase is over. But, I want to ignore any arguments about that here and instead try to figure out what parts of a game (if its even okay to consider them separately) can contribute to the artistic value of the whole game.

Traditional Storytelling
Games can and do have excellent stories, comparable or better than anything seen in film, books or television. This type of art is well-known, and telling it through a game's viewpoint is very interesting. Examples of this include The Dreamfall series and God of War, both of which are well-known for their story-telling ability. As games grow up, they begin to find unique ways to tell stories. The Half-Life series is famous for this, telling the entire story with no narrative explanation from the first-person viewpoint as events are happening.

Interactive Storytelling
This is a new form to gaming, essentially derived from Choose-Your-Own-Adventures, but much more flexible. Good examples include The Wing Commander series and Deus Ex. These both have branching storylines with multiple endings. There is a lot of academic work in this field, which I keep track of at a blog called Grand Text Auto.

Traditional Audiovisual Aesthetics
This is what is usually shown in the form of screenshots. I, personally, think that this work is very admirable but effort could be expended much better elsewhere. Still, there are some very beautiful games out there, such as Myst or Riven or Shadow of the Colossus. Unfortunately, when a game is advertised, this is usually the only part of the game that the consumer sees.

Formal Rule Sets
This is where games started long ago. Chess is a good example, so are modern RPGs, or the MMORPG Eve Online, which has over 30,000 players and a persistent virtual economy. Games that have too much emphasis on this part of their design tend to only be attractive to a small audience, something the predominantly science and engineering background male games industry struggles with. I'd also like to extend the idea of formal rule sets not just to slow-paced RPGs but also to faster-paced First-Person Shooters. When you are fighting in an FPS, your thinking can be quite advanced, for example:
"The enemy has a Covenant turrent placed behind the rock and there are three grunts with sticky plasma grenades. I can't drive my Warthog in because they'll stick me so maybe I'll drive a Ghost over and ditch it while equipping a needler so as to take out the Gold Elite. I'll save my only frag grenade to turn over the turret and take the dead Gold Elite's plasma gun to take out the remaining grunts."

Fertile Area for Emergent Gameplay
When a game has formal rule sets, but there are no clear goals, emergent gameplay occurs. This is a bit of a buzzword in the games industry right now. Anything by Will Wright is an excellent example of this (Sim City, Sim Life, Sim Earth, The Sims, upcoming Spore). These are really fun, and they have a very wide audience appeal.

The Action-Response Relationship with the User
This is the way in which the game (on whatever platform) responds to user input. Of all the above-mentioned experiences, this is unique to electronic interactive media, and what I'm really interested in. This is the same effect as improvised interactive theatre, where the user is playing a role. Through this method, games can do amazing things, like explore the nature of experience and sanity. Advanced interactive storytelling is also possible, such as with Facade. Examples of this are rare, but they are becoming more common. The best example I could find is a game called Eternal Darkness:Sanity's Requiem where there is a "sanity meter" which depletes during gameplay. As the sanity of the player gets lower and lower, strange things happen in the game world, and the fourth wall is broken with terrifying effect.

The reason why I find games so attractive is that they have so many different ways to express themselves, and I think we are just hitting the tip of the iceberg.

I am a Superhero

2007-03-28T14:55:00.000-04:00

Your results:
You are Iron Man

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

Home Base

2007-03-21T22:09:00.000-04:00

This is, possibly, one of my most favourite film shorts of all time.

I'm not sure if it appeals to me personally alot, or what. My favourite actor is the mother, but in my opinion the script is genius.

Brain damage turns man into human chameleon

2007-03-20T16:29:00.000-04:00

What a fascinating article.

This leads to alot of interesting discussions of acting, role-playing and identity crises.

A Bar-worthy conversation

2007-03-18T14:49:00.000-04:00

It was St. Patrick's day. I had finished several Bailey's on the Rock, three cans of Guiness, two black velvets, two Toucan Breakfasts and seven episodes of Arrested Development. The group decided to stop by at QP for some pool. Naturally, the combination of the bodily abuse I was giving myself now and the payback from Player's last night led to the deterioration of my mental and physical state. I began to subconsciously ask questions like:

"Should I go home and go to sleep?"

This would have turned out to be a mistake, based on events that would happen later in the night.

But I didn't. I left my friends at the pool table, and turned to something that I do often in a social bar environment. I wander, and begin to the speak to the first person who makes and holds significant eye contact. I actually found many groups that I knew this night, and wandered around and through them, causing the occasional laugh, or hugging or shaking hands or remembering names.

Then I settled on a really good one introduced to myself by my good friend Kelsey Benning; and this is where the meat comes in.

Some how the phrase "Green with Envy" came up. It occurred to me that there are seven deadly sins, and seven colours in the traditional high school rainbow. Our goal was to find a 1-1 relation between colours and deadly sins, preferably which would fill in the phrase

"Colour with Deadly Sin"

We looked for cases where the association would "seem" right, not for any sort of formal meaning. And so we came up with:

Red Rage
Orange Gluttony
Yellow Sloth
Green Envy
Blue Greed
Indigo Lust
Violet Pride

Green and Envy were pretty obvious. Yellow was associated with cowardice, and Sloth. Orange came to mean candy wrappers or something, hence Gluttony. Blue was Greed because of conservatism or something (Blue is the colour of the conservatives in Canada). Red was a toss-up between Rage and Lust, but it eventually went to Rage because it fit the phrase "Red with Rage" better. Violet came to be associated with gay Pride. Finally, leaving Lust with Indigo, which I justify as the colour your genitalia turn after hours of rough sex.

Idea Factory

2007-03-17T10:05:00.000-04:00

My wall is slowly getting covered with 8 1/2 by 11s, scrawling in messy blue pens with hastily done drawings. Where something isn't big enough to be committed to lined paper, it becomes a post-it note: sometimes nothing more than a pun or an interesting re-spelling, sometimes a whole bunch of meaning condensed to the one word on the vulnerable piece of sticky paper.

I have ideas coming out the wazoo now. Most of them are getting committed to paper; the ones that don't have the same light after 24 hours are thrown away and destroyed. The best of them start being implemented. The absolute best, even just barely, might stand a chance of being finished.

Dustin

ps. Dear Metal Gear Solid 3,

You lose. Your overly-long and valueless cut scenes, your lack of camera control and your absolute absence of decent character development has turned you against me. I don't care what your reviewers say - you're self-involved and, at worse, you don't seem to be much of an actual game.

We're breaking up.

Discovery: Grammatical Group

2007-03-14T10:47:00.000-04:00

While over a discussion with my linguist/awesome/web programmer friend Eric Akaoka, I discovered the most interesting thing.

He was going about correcting people on the proper use of the plural form of words, which is completely normal for him.
e.g.

Octopus -> Octopi
Uterus -> Uteri
Clitoris -> Clitorises

Clitoris turned out to be a bit confusing, since most people expected the plural to be Clitori, but Eric corrected us that it was, in fact, Clitorises. For it to be the way we expected, the word would have had to be "Clitorus" with the -us ending.

Suddenly it hit me.

I turned to Eric, and asked
"So, what's the plural of 'us' then?"

There was a few seconds of silence, and then we realized that we had discovered something beautiful:

The plural of I is US, and the plural of US is I. Mathematically speaking, {I, us} is a group under the "plural" operation.

So,

plural(I) = Us
plural(Us) = I

also, the product plural*plural is the identity operator.
i.e. plural(plural(I)) = (plural*plural)(I) = I

fantastic!

Nemesi

2007-03-05T01:48:00.000-05:00

So, I'm sorting through some of the final tech stuff for Deviants, and I come across this wonderful piece of stupid art, by this guy named Mondrian.

I'm sure you have all seen stuff like this before. Now to learn more about who this was, I turned as I always do to wikipedia. It turns out Mondrian had a rival painter around the same time period, named Doesburg. They even had a very serious split over a period of a few years. Let's take a look at Doesburg's paintings, shall we:

(drumroll)

On close inspection, they are NOT, in fact, the same! Allow me to quote from this wikipedia article:

"During 1924 the two men had disagreements, which eventually lead to a (temporary) split in the same year. The exact reason of this split has been a point among art historians; usually the divergent ideas about the directions of the lines in the paintings have been named as the primary reason: Mondrian never accepted diagonals, whereas Doesburg insisted on the diagonal's dynamic aspects, and indeed featured it in his art. However, Mondrian accepted some concepts of diagonals, such as in his "Lozenge" paintings, where the canvas was rotated 45 degrees, while still maintaining horizontal lines."

WHAT! THEY SPLIT OVER WHETHER OR NOT TO USE DIAGONAL LINES??!?!?!?!

Back to work.

Deviants Next Week

2007-03-03T23:19:00.000-05:00

Its weeks like these when I'm unconsciously making deals with Father Time.

The Deviants opens next week. I wrote, acted and designed the set. This is one of the moments when you are throwing yourself out there, and in the last minute you question whether you're really just full of shit. I think that's healthy. I think that this production has made me grow so much as a writer, actor and member of a creative group. Although its the most stressed I've ever been, I realize that this is the sort of stuff I want to do for the rest of my life.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG

2007-03-01T22:52:00.000-05:00

An excellent column in The Escapist on satire, violence in videogames, videogames not getting the same treatment as other art forms and the meaning of experiencing something.

For the record, I have not played the game mentioned in the title, but after reading the article I kind of want to.

I hear typing

2007-02-28T15:27:00.000-05:00

This post is in the vein of more game design thoughts.

I've played alot of different video games. And I'm saying, alot. More frequently, I'm playing modern console games. Generally, these are more leaning towards casual, low-commitment play.

Recently, though, with a few of the more modern games, I'm getting this sense. Its hard to explain - I'm not sure exactly what it is. Its not a good feeling, surely, but I'm not sure if its bad either, and maybe its just me. Its the same sort of feeling I get when I'm watching a scene from a film or movie and an actor says what they're thinking instead of acting it or showing it. I feel insulted, like I'm being spoonfed. Is it because I might have a higher literacy level than the film's intended audience in the medium we're looking at? I hate thinking that way, because that makes me appear snobbish, which I may be.

Either way, its an issue.

Specifically, the feeling I'm getting from games recently is that I'm being spoonfed. Not that the puzzle or obstacle is too easy, just that its forced and unnatural.

For example, in Half-Life 2:Episode 1 There is a moment where Alyx Vance and Gordon Freeman come to a door. Previously we've seen doors like these where you turn a knob on the side but, in this case, the knob is missing. Alyx says "Something's missing." Now, Half-Life is intended for the adult audience, and somehow I feel a little let down when I turn 180 degrees to see a pile of boxes. Sure enough, after some aggressive maneuvers with the gravity gun, I find the knob at the bottom corner of the pile and I attach it to the door to continue on.

My reaction is "Why did you bother to waste my time with such a simplistic puzzle?"

My later reaction is that I felt spoonfed. I felt like, not only was the puzzle easy, but that I was pushed along. Also, it felt very symbolic - too symbol. This particular puzzle can be generalized to:

"Something is missing, find it to continue."

Valve calls puzzles of the type above "gates" (Ref. Half-Life 2, Ep 1 Commentary). Specifically, making sure something happens before the player can go on. Valve often mentions in the above commentary that they put in these types of puzzles to fight "combat fatigue"; meaning it is good to bracket intense combat with slower-paced puzzle-solving. I call this particular puzzle "symbolic" because I feel it is general, and has little to do with the actual situation the player is in.

My overarching issue is that this archetypal puzzle has nothing to do with our situation: Gordon, Alyx, the Combine, or even the particular type of door for that matter. It feels cartoony. It basically could have been "let's stop the gameplay until this chess-playing demon allows us to pass." For me, it brings my focus out of the realm of the game universe.

I worked with a playwright last year on The Time Project, which eventually became Heterotopia. One of the nuggets he left with me was that often playwrights, when listening to their own work, will often hear the clacking sounds of a typewriter. They are unable to experience their own work separate from the fact that they created it as a piece of work; they are unable to experience their play as a play itself, but also as something that was constructed.

I think that's the feeling I'm getting. I hear typing - I can tell Half Life 2:Episode 1 is a game (and many others too). This shouldn't happen.

When I had two guys over at my house last week to volunteer for the Kingston Improv Games I rented a bunch of games for my housemate's Playstation 2. One of the games was Shadow of the Colossus, which I think is one of the best games I've ever played. To give an ultra-short synopsis, you fight 16 colossi (10-200m in height) in this deserted land in order to bring to life a young woman that you brought in on your horse Agro. Its a very still, moving and, at times, sad game. Although at times I felt I could hear the typing, it never made me break from the reality of the beautifully-constructed universe.

So, here's the challenge: Let's make gameplay that relates directly to the environment we're in and doesn't break our focus from it.

PS. Half-Life 2:Episode 1 is a fantastic game. It's just the most readily available example I have. Valve does an amazing job.

IN OTHER NEWS:

The Deviants coming up next week. Watch here for press release/pictures/etc.

Flash Games I've Made

2007-02-20T14:46:00.000-05:00

I've decided to catalogue all the flash work I've done into one easy-to-access post.

Open the Door

What is it?

Open the Door

2007-02-20T13:11:00.001-05:00

V-Day Post

2007-02-14T16:47:00.000-05:00

Topically speaking, I think this is genius

Smart Guys Date in Parallel.

Current Life Sum

2007-02-09T18:45:00.000-05:00

(Blue Scarf + Rental Car + Hyper Improv Kids + Good TA Evaluations + 3K Scholarship + Delicious Chicken Breast + Art/Porn Movies + SexyBack + Contributed to giant snow fort - didn't sleep last night because building giant snow fort - Busiest semester of life yet + Sense of giddiness at it all - Starting assignment now that was due today - Starting script that was due today + Improv Show getting a wall at the Club + Warm pizza smell - Rehearsal tomorrow morning + Free comedy show with Doctor friend tonight - Laundry not finished + Leopard Print sheets) > 0

means

Life Rocks my Socks off right now.

Sin Combinatrics

2007-02-06T12:49:00.000-05:00

I think this is fantastic.

Found here: http://indexed.blogspot.com/2007/01/were-all-going-to-hell.html

What is it?

2007-01-28T14:06:00.000-05:00

I PROMISE - more verbosity is coming. Currently my energies are elsewhere.

What kind of science fiction writer am I?

2007-01-28T14:05:00.000-05:00

I am:

Alfred Bester

A pyrotechnic talent who put only a small portion of his energy into writing.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Supplementary Material

2007-01-24T20:28:00.000-05:00

Winner of the 2007 Focus Film Festival.

I did the camera. Thanks to my dad and younger bro, Skyler.

More verbose posts to come...

I'm in an internet commerical

2007-01-23T17:31:00.000-05:00

www.keyprop.com/worryfreeliving

So, just before the winter break I had a free day during exam period. What's the best way to spend a free day? Why - participate in a commercial!

You notice me as the guy holding the tuba, sweating his ass off in the sweat red digs.

There are four episodes coming out in total. I think I have bit parts in all of them - click on the link above to see them.