Everkvetch

Return of the frickin' big hornets

I thought that we had weathered the storm of hornets that had besieged our quiet home.  It turns out that they were just on hiatus to wait out the unnaturally warm weather we had had this past week.

Last night after dinner my wife and I decided that a little family time spent in hitting Target would be beneficial.  We could knock off a couple of projects we had been meaning  to get done in the evening once our daughter was in bed.

As we opened the door to leave, a rather large and very active hornet whizzed by our heads.

Sh*t.

Wife and daughter back upstairs and in bedroom while I plan out what exactly it is I am going to do to get us out of the house.  As I'm thinking through options, a second, larger hornet crawls from the back side of the shade protecting our porch light and casts an enormous, hornet-y shadow across the door.

Good thing I had paused for a second or two.  Or was it a minute?  or two?  or five?

I try some options.  They like the light.  I turn out the porch light.  After a couple of minutes I turn the light back on and I can't see the hornets.

Sh*t.  Now I have 2 hornets out there and I don't know where they *are*.

Auuuuughhhh!

Ok, I see know where one is.  Right in front of my nose staring me down through the storm door.  If I wasn't so freaked I might have noticed that it had a certain elegant beauty.  Instead I jump back involuntarily just in case the hornet is able to magically remove the glass barrier between us.

Ok, so where it the other.... as if on cue it returns to dive bombing the light.

Time for plan B.

God, I wish I had a plan B.

I was going to try to go out and turn on a light at the other end of the porch.  Sadly that involves going outside and using an exterior switch.  Note to self, check wiring plans and route something internally for future insect sieges.

Instead I just stand there watching these poor insects batter themselves against a shade, seeking a reconciliation with some misunderstood god-like force of light and warmth. 

One of the hornets decides to fly to the ledge around the top of the porch.  Possibly a mistake.  The ledge is home to any of a variety of spiders that feast on the small gnats and bugs that infiltrate our porch when the screens are showing the wounds of a summer of use.  I see the hornet crawling along and then stop for a moment, detained in a web.  A spider a quarter of the size of the hornet makes its way down to the jiggling insect, expecting a feast.  If a spider can register surprise, I think this one did.  It moved quickly down to wrap the insect, and moved more quickly to retreat to a safe  distance when it realized what had been ensnared.

Well, ensnared isn't really the proper word.  At this point the hornet, unable to fly, but able to walk, pulls a full-on Frodo in Shelob's lair and begins to pull through the web.  It looks as though its freedom will be short lived as it hits a second web and then a third.  But the owners of these webs are no more anxious to take on this angry buzz-saw and eventually it takes flight, trailing a dirty, sticky banner of broken web behind it.

Great.  Now I have an angry, sticky, webby hornet on my porch.  I grabbed some photos which I will post later.

As for the trip... The morning didn't seem like such a bad option anymore.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So the end of my last post was about these buggers suggested that there could be a game here.

Right now I have a hornet with "gravity wells" around lights that attract/distract from true goal and spiders that can at least slow you down if not bring you down.

I'm not much for insects, but there may be something here as long as I don't head down the path to make a hornet based "Mister Mosquito"  (although I could do worse than to emulate elements of that game.)

Hold everything, we're gonna bring....choc....olate....

Ok, so to the hypothetical one or two of you out there who are of the subset that you read what I write AND you happen to like Stephen Sondheim's work will get the reference, but you won't know why the hell I'm using it.

The rest of you can just look below...

 

I don't usually do these little quizzes, but I saw it on my friend Deanna's blog and had to know.  In the past I often felt that I was born on the wrong continent (played soccer instead of football, spent my twenties traveling as a competitive cyclist,  despise the ridiculousness of the term "freedom fries."  You get the idea...)

So it turns out that despite all of my thoughts that I was inspired by German or Italian heritage, there must really be some really deep love of tulips in my psyche... I have no idea how my answers brought me this result.

Your Inner European is Dutch!

Open minded and tolerant. You're up for just about anything.

Who's Your Inner European?

Torque Game Builder 1.5.1 - instructional tool? metrics layer?

I spent some time looking at the Torque Game Builder 1.51 on Tuesday night.  It has been almost a year since I've had the time to play around with the tool. I was a little nervous because I proposed writing a "research layer" for an independent study I'm doing at Teacher's College, Columbia University.  I was happy to find that not only should TGB support this approach, but it has a new feature that will make it insanely easy for developers and researchers to add these research components to their game objects.

I am referring the TGB's addition of 'behaviors.

A behavior is essentially custom code that can be attached to a game object via the designers interface.  So, for instance, a game sprite could have a Thrust move behavior (asteroids style), a takes damage behavior and so on.  I am hoping to write data collection behaviors so that academics who want to research what makes games good for learning can focus on making good games, rather than on getting data back from their tool.

Why do I think this is a good idea?

Well, research methods are pretty flexible, but once you have defined the scope of your study, you need to be sure that your game will be recording the data that you will need to analyze.  Truth be told, we academics are more likely to be comfortable writing the code for data collection than we are for producing a game that anyone will find enjoyable to play.  It's not that we can't write good games.  (well, maybe it is... But with people like Jessica teaching at TC that won't be able to be said for long.)

My goal is to make  data collection so simple that the effort of subsequent projects at TC using TGB can be to hone gameplay.

As such, I am porting a game concept that I had prototyped in director to TGB and writing custom behavior to report research subject data.  Ideally, this will allow a researcher to view the results of an entire level being played by each subject, and will allow aggregate data to be mapped as an overlay on top of the game world.

Hmmmm.... where have I seen something like this before.....?

I wonder how much of the research needs of academia could be met in larger commercial engines from the kinds of metrics work that Darius, Jeff and Craig are doing up at OrbusGameWorks.  At any rate,  I think I may need to pick Jeff's brain on some of the finer points of metrics API development.

Frickin' big hornets

Ok, so the earlier this week I was playing a little KOTOR to refresh myself on the game in preparation for a game design lecture I'm giving later this semester.  Out of the corner of my eye I see something HUGE divebombing the only light in the room.

This thing was a legitimate 2 inches long.  Including the stinger, anyway.

I left the room quickly, made sure that the door to my daughter's room was closed, and headed downstairs to get something to capture this monster.  Fortunately, this thing was in the last day of its life.  It was lethargic.  It had to land often.  And this allowed me to place a large container over it, slide some cardboard under the opening, and release in to the wild at some distance from my house.

Disaster averted.

Later that evening I went down in to the kitchen to discover an only slightly smaller specimen flitting around the lights. 

Crap...

It finally landed on a counter and I was able to trap it there.  I wanted a live one to take over to the entomology department at Rutgers for identification.  But it had died by the next morning.

So had two others that had been trapped on the front porch.

Four monster insects in one night.  This didn't bode well.

Over the next few days we have had six more in the house, including one panicked cry from my wife at 5:00am that there was a 'bee' in the bedroom.

Oh - just for reference: Image of hornet

Good news - they are docile unless you get too close to their nest.  Bad news - the queen is going to over-winter and establish a new colony, and there  could be 400-700 of these things in the area.  Oh yeah, and I have no idea where the nest is.  Oh... and the recommendation is that they be dealt with only by professional exterminators.

So now I'm thinking.... there has to be a game here somewhere.

When is a game not a game...

I wasn't going to blog about this one, but as I climbed in my car yesterday morning I caught the tail end of Marketplace on my local NPR station.  As the show was ending I heard the announcer say "Try our new game, Consumer Consequences  (available at http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumerconsequences/ )

And I shouted out in frustration.

A very nice post had come through on the socialissuegames listserv asking the members to check out this game.  Sadly, there was no game there.

In effect, it was a survey of your current lifestyle coupled to a numerical model that shows how many earths it would take to sustain that lifestyle if everyone on the planet lived that way.  Now, I do think this is a useful site.  It is interesting to see how my lifestyle has an impact on the planet.  But the authors of this tool obviously looked at games, said that they make noise, have graphics, and allow people to customize an avatar, and ended there.  They never even looked at the core feedback loop that makes up gameplay.

And that is my main issue.  The 'game' doesn't encourage playfulness with the topic.  The feedback loop exists in one major iteration.  That's it!  Then give us your info so you can see how you ranked compared with other people who have filled out the survey.  (I can't even bring myself to say "played the game.")

Anyway, check it out for yourself and let me know if you think I'm over-reacting or if you agree with me.

Clean up in aisle 12

I found this post languishing in draft mode of my typepad account.  Isn't it funny how things that are so important at the moment fade so quickly from our memories.  Note the unresolved portion of the story that obviously kept me from posting this originally.

Having said that, the main concerns raised still remain...

-----------

From some time in the spring of 2005

Sunday.  A day to get some yard work done.  And a day to do some much needed shopping for some food.  During this past semester Silvia and I haven't seen much of one another.  I'm working a 9-5 day now and was teaching until 10:30 or 11:00 three nights out of the week.  When I wasn't in the classroom, she was, either teaching or being taught.  University life at its finest.

So grades are in (or will be on Monday, at least) and now we have two whole weeks before the hellish summer semester kicks in.  Silvia is booked to teach 4 nights out of the week.  Maybe I'll see her in August.

But for now I have  two weeks where the only person I hope to see in the evening is her.

Which means that we are off of the diet of pizza and white castle for the coming two weeks.  Which leads me back to aisle 12.

A local supermarket, a mispriced item, a quick run to the courtesy booth.

"This package is mislabeled, it should be 1.99/pound instead of 2.99"

"Oh yes, we've been having trouble with having these labeled properly.  Just tell the cashier to weigh the item and enter 1.99"

No worries.  We get to checkout and  almost forget to ask the cashier, catching the error just in time.  I explain what had been told to me at the courtesy  booth.  He is very apologetic but he can't fathom a way to assist me.  He and the girl at checkout start to attempt to figure out the correct price in their heads.  She proffers a suggested amount and he shrugs his shoulders, claiming that he's no good at math.  I patiently explain again that all he needs t odo is place it on the scale and weight the item and the system will do the work of calculating the proper amount.

At this point I have two orthogonal concerns - one is that this young man is unable to calculate the proper result manually and the second is that he doesn't understand the computer system at his command.

The first  is of concern to me because I used to teach high school mathematics.   There were a number of ways to approach this problem to get a rough ball park answer, and he was unable to select even one.  Perhaps he was too nervous to make an attempt at doing math in public.  Some people don't like to read in public.  And cell phones have tip calculator software for a reason.

The other concern is multipronged.  The system didn't make it obvious that it could solve the problem, and it was apparent he hadn't encountered this before.  He kept explaining that he needed a 4 digit product code in order for the scale to be of any use.  It is obvious that this is the primary use of the scale.  Everything else is bar-coded with an exact amount or price lookup based upon the UPC.  It is only produce that needs to be weighed, and each of those items does have a 4 digit code glued to the surface. (Mmmmmmmm..... toxic glue.....)

{{Resolution of the matter goes here}}

 

So back to my question - what happens when the very tools that are used to allow a business to run more efficiently (a good thing) simultaneously place lower cognitive demands on its workers (a bad thing), making them slaves to either the machine or a routine way of operating.

With jobs moving off shore and other parts of the world bridging the knowledge gap, the consolation trumpted by captains of industry  has been that the truly creative work in the IT field will still be performed state-side .  Just the mundane tasks will be moved to sites where there are lower costs of production.  But what of the people who  {post ends here}

I think I was going to write.... are not in this group of creative thinkers?

When will instructional designers learn what game design means?

I spoke at an NMC conference with Jess Hammer in New Haven in the fall of 2005.  At the conference an erstwhile designer from Boston College was showing a 'game' that had been developed for members of the nursing program.  The problem was that to the development team, the aspects that made it a game were all of the surface trappings of game play.  It had nice graphics.  It had audio feedback on mouse over.  It didn't look like a standard web page.  There was only one problem.

It was really a multiple choice/matching test in which there was exactly one correct arrangement of four  possible solutions that the students had to figure out.

That was it.  Nothing else.

I blogged about it extensively on the Eggplant Lab blog (long since disappeared) detailing how several of us in the audience used the Q&A  period to  extend the design to make it a game.

I wish that I still had the post.

The problem that I see repeatedly is the mis-mapping of the game's appearance or the game's engine to be the critical component of what makes a digital artifact a game.  What makes the design a game is the choice of actions within the systems presented to the player.

To be fair, I made this same mistake in my first attempt to create a game for instruction back in 2003.  It had the feeling of being an experience, but it was not a game.

So what brings me to rant about this at time?

Another example, this one out of the Utah State University.  The project is a virtual environment that is intended to help engage students with the poem Voices of Spoon River.  I was reading the research write-up (Need the link) and the author was quoting John Kirriemuir about the paucity of instructional 'games ' actually having interesting game play.  And then in the implementation section the author asserts that using the Quake 3 engine for his project meets Kirriemuir's requirement, completely missing the point!  Aaaaauuuughhhh!

I haven't yet played the game, so my criticism is of the write up rather than the 'game'.  But I'm not too hopeful of what awaits me.

Kvetch 3.0

There is so much going on and I need to get my thoughts out there before my head asplodes (sic).

I guess it's time to say it: Kvetch is back.