Teaching Games. Also, GT7K.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

So: Teaching is hard.

(If you are a teacher, this is where you make a face at the screen and say “no shit.”)

Quickly, before I begin: My high school students know how to use Google. And a few know the quiet art of Googling someone’s name to figure out more about them. So! Some of them are at least cursorily aware of this blog — some might even read this. In which case: Hello, there, young scholar. Mr. Knowles has a potty mouth. (They don’t call me “Mr. Knowles.” They also don’t really call me “Josh.” They prefer “Hey.”)

I do hope some students check this out, actually. One of the most eye-opening parts of teaching, so far, has simply been seeing the classroom from the other side of the desk. Being a student is kind of a freaky experience — you’re young, so your baseline is you sitting there stewing in fresh hormones. And then you’re dumped into the deep end of topics that you might not give a particular shit about — but if you don’t excel at them, well, then Your Future is in jeopardy. And you are judged. By teachers. By peers. By coaches. By parents. For me, at least, I had almost no headspace left over whatsoever to ponder what the teaching experience might be like. If I had, it probably would’ve relaxed me a bit. Which probably would’ve made me looser and more communicative in class. Less intimidated. Maybe one side-effect of this new communication culture in which we live is that current students can get a touch of insight into what’s going on in their teachers’ minds and outside lives. (At least those teachers who blog.) Which is humanizing. And good. (As long as the teacher isn’t into stuff like flashing people on the subway or dismembering squirrels.)

Some of that constricted headspace is necessary. School is about molding brains. So sometimes you just have to sit someone down and lay out the facts for them and make sure they remember what you said. But. High schools need significantly more Montessori-style and collaboration-focused teaching. Especially since if you get someone excited about the possibilities of a Thing, then they’ll naturally start asking questions about what that Thing is and how it works. And generating excitement is something that happens via play and exploration. And open conversation.

Which is kind of the over-arching goal of the game design class I’m co-teaching over at Bushwick High in Brooklyn. I’m trying to stoke their interest in making games (which isn’t terribly hard) and convert it into playful exploration with game making tools. And then use that to stoke their interest in other related topics.

I am not achieving that goal, currently. By the way. Currently things are a bit of a mess.

Which is why I say teaching is hard.

I have been given the chance to have an unusual perspective on teaching. Last year I taught, for the first time, a high school class, an undergraduate class, and a graduate course. It’s neat to be able to compare and contract students at these different levels. And there’s no question: High school is the most challenging.

Part of that difficulty is simply that it’s very, very hard to judge results — at least in a situation like mine where I’m trying to facilitate creativity (I can’t just give ‘em exams at the end). I try to communicate and, more importantly, I try to impart bigger perspectives and simply get them excited about something. And the students will superficially let you know what they think — they will, for example, drift off to YouTube the moment they get the littlest bit bored. But it’s tough to know what’s working at what’s not: What sticks in their head in such a way that they ponder it on their walk home after school? That’s extremely difficult for me to see. And, to put it in programmer terms, it makes it very difficult to optimize and debug my teaching.

Then there’s this second issue. The easy part of teaching game design is getting kids interested. Computer games (anything played using a device with a microchip) have such a tight grip on a certain demographic. It’s possibly the only subject these kids will have in high school where other teachers and parents will be concerned that they’re spending too much time with the material outside of class. And, possibly, one of the few cases where a strong argument could be made that the students have a deeper relationship with the material than the teacher does. (At least when it comes to certain games.)

The hard part is kind of everything else that comes after that.

For example. Let me start with a question:

What can you use game design to teach? What disciplines are contained within or overlap game design?

• Computer programming. Obviously. (And, yes, “game design” encompasses more than just computer game or video game design — but that’s the format we’re dealing with in class.)

• Technology platforms.

• Math. Logic.

• Visual design.

• Sound design.

• User interface design. (Rescue the princess? How does a player even know that’s the goal? What does the “A” button do? Why did I die when I touched that?(

• Storytelling.

• Social media.

• Cultural context and situation.

• Potentially all sorts of business stuff: Marketing. Sales. Money.

• And then whatever the content of the game itself is about.

If you’re into games, none of this is new. (And I’m leaving out “game design” because, well, no shit.) But it creates a meta-design issue.

I’m trying to teach them how to make games themselves. Computer games. And when I taught this class last Summer I went through several tools before settling on YoYoGames’ GameMaker software. Which was pretty good. Except that all of our time was spent on the first element above: Computer programming. It took an entire two hour class to just get a sprite on the screen that they could move with the arrow keys. For a short class, that’s just way too long. Especially when they’re making 2D sprite-based games. They all just wound up making erratic variations of bullet hell shooters: Top-down games where you use the arrow keys to move a sprite around and fire a blazing torrent of bullets every which way in order to kill some baddies.

We had zero opportunity to even begin to explore any of these other topics. And — speaking as someone who codes all day and loves it — I think the computer programming part is the necessary but otherwise least important piece of the game design puzzle. Storytelling. Visual design. Hell, just the general ability to have a vision of a feeling or effect you want to have on your players. “I want to scare them.” “I want them to be so happy they can’t contain themselves.” “I want them to learn about how viruses mutate.” “I want a two-player game that causes people to fall in love.” That’s the meat of any creative art. “I want several thousand lines of Objective C code sitting on my hard drive” — ugh, no.

And we were additionally hamstrung by the fact that GameMaker lives on the computer hard drives, along with all their files. So they couldn’t work from home. And if they used a different machine the next week, they had to start over. And — critically — they had no way to be proud of the game at the end. No way to share. No way to see other people play it (beyond the few of us in class).

So I decided to be a hubristic coder and just develop my own game-making platform. Which — I don’t know. I’ve been bothering everybody about this thing, so I feel weird getting into it, here. But let’s go for it so I can do some thinking about what it is and where it needs to go. Because, as currently conceived, it is broken. But there is a spark of a core idea inside of it which is solid. It’s heart is in the right place. I think.

Oh: GT7K. Gametron 7000. That’s the name. Background: I made a simple level-editor tool as a project while at ITP. It let you make levels on the web and then play them on your mobile phone. (J2ME, bitches. 2006.) There’s very little overlap, otherwise, between these projects. But I kind of like the name, so I reused it.

(And you’re welcomed to sign up for a GT7K invite, but I’m not opening up the actual tool to everyone. It’s very undercooked at the moment.)

So. GT7K.

The whole idea behind GT7K is that I want to get the students from zero to simple game in five minutes. You sign in. I explain how it works. Click, click, click. Simple game. What took four weeks using GameMaker I want to compress into five minutes. Impossible, you say. But, no! Everything in GT7K is social. So if you want a space invaders game, you go find one that’s already been made that’s close to what you want. Copy it. Customize. Bam. You have a game.

And the thinking, here, isn’t that I want the students to make 400 shitty space invader clones per hour. The thinking is that I want to compress the computer programming part of the equation down so that after that five minutes they’re thinking of character design, level design, storytelling, etc. The other stuff. If they enjoy what they’re doing, they’ll dig into the coding side of things on their own. That’s how it works, right? Isn’t that how half of us (at least) learned to code in the first place? “That’s really cool! How do I do that? How do I change that? How do I do more than that?” If I can get the code out of the way so they can explore the other creative elements in game design, maybe they’ll unlock a deeper interest and appreciation and then they can go back and get excited by how the code works. (Or discover they love making graphics. Or playing with sound. Or writing stories. Coding is not the only thing people who make games do.)

One student exemplified this. Second class, I think. This semester (maybe a month ago). My approach to introducing my high school students to GT7K was simply to explain the overall philosophy of the app — what the different sorts of “objects” in the game were, how to edit them, etc — and then just let them explore. I’d answer any questions as they came up. By the second class, one student had already copied a simple platformer I made and had altered it to create a simple story. My platformer was mostly just a game engine test — making sure the sprites moved properly and that collisions worked and such. Not even a game. But he took it and took the random graphics I’d tossed into it (a girl character, a spaceship, some space invaders-like creatures), and created a story: You’re the girl. You’re on a planet. You have to fight through the aliens (jumping and shooting) to get to your spaceship so you can leave and get home. (Touching the spaceship ended the game with a “you win” message.)

This was very, very simple, obviously. Certainly the student who created it didn’t melt any brain cells doing it. But. It was exactly what I was hoping to see. He shortcut past most of the programming stuff and got straight to the point where he could think about telling a story.

And GT7K is all online, so that game is accessible on any computer on the planet without having to upload it or publish it or anything. (Again, I’m not going to link to it right now because all of GT7K is under wraps until I’m comfortable opening it up.) And he could work on it from home. Etc.

And! If another student finds it inspiring, they can make a copy for themselves and change it up however they want. Click, click, click. New game. New ideas.

Hopefully I am — in my babbling way — communicating my overall goals with GT7K. (I’ve had a few beers — can you tell?)

And, so.

Now the bad news:

This is a huge design challenge. Oh, lord. Currently, like I said, GT7K has a glimmer of something good flickering at its core, but creating tools that feel engaging, inviting, fun, understandable, satisfying… Holy shit. It’s not really any of those things at the moment. At least not as much I want it to be. And finding that point of balance between flexibility and ease-of-use is very hard. These kids with no programming skills need to be able to get their hands dirty with it and have success. But how do I balance between “understandable but restrictive” and “complicated but flexible?” I don’t know where that point it. It’s quite possible I’m in completely over my head.

(And, although my current audience is high school kids — how do I build this thing with an eye on the general population? I could see it being of interest to all sorts of people.)

This is where it gets all confusing and murky to me. Firstly, I’m not some epic game designer myself. The universe of game design is so rich and dynamic at the moment, every time I look there’s some fascinating new game or some interesting new tool for game making. Just last week, for example, Valve released their Portal 2 level editor called “Perpetual Testing Initiative.” I haven’t played with it yet, but wow. It looks amazing. And, of course, projects like GameStar Mechanic. Which, when it comes to thinking about the educational use of game-making platforms, I’ve put about 1/10th of 1% of the thought and creativity into it that those folks have. So I’m trying to navigate this narrow space where I’m allowing myself to build something inferior to other products in many ways just so I can learn and potentially have a revelation or two that will let it evolve in a new and distinctive direction.

Six months in, I’m just getting the first tastes of what those things might be. Though, the ideas aren’t well-formed enough to really write about here, except to say that restrictive tools can actually lead to creative power — that’s nothing new — so I’m beginning to hone in on how to turn the necessarily restrictive nature of a project like this into a feature, not a bug.

Well, and there’s a vary obvious differentiator, which has been a part of the idea from the start: All objects within GT7K are completely open and shareable between users. See something you like? Copy it and use it. As far as I know, I haven’t seen anything quite as molecularly shareable like this. It’s funny. That part of GT7K has been so baked in from day one that I kind of lose sight of it.

Anyway. That’s a couple thousand words, so let’s wrap up. Hopefully I’ve given a little insight into my thinking on teaching and game design. Both teaching and the attempt at creating this game design tool have been mind-expanding. (Hopefully for the students, as well!)

If you are interested in GT7K, please sign up so I have your e-mail address. The opening-up process will be slow, but I would love to get feedback from everyone I can. I’m not a spammer and I won’t do anything weird. I’ll probably just get a little over-excited if I think I’m stumbled upon something compelling.

Thanks for reading!

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Grandma + Skype

Sunday, November 27, 2011

So here’s something interesting.

I spend my Thanksgivings out in Pennsylvania with my 94-year-old grandmother (my mom’s mom, the PA Dutch former kindergarten teacher). For various reasons, including that I have a tiny extended family none of whom live particularly close to one another, it’s usually just her and I for this particular holiday. My parents stick in Texas. We usually do the obligatory “Happy Thanksgiving” call with them, which is fine.

This year I decided to try something a bit different. I had my laptop handy (natch), and since my parents had recently discovered the brave new world of video calling with Skype, I figured I’d see what happened when I cranked up Skype and stuck my grandmother in front of it to talk with the family.

My grandmother is, I should note, mostly deaf. And blind to a certain degree. Speaking with her is a relatively slow and deliberate process of picking simple sentences and enunciating them clearly a couple times until she gets what you’re saying. The blindness I’m not as clear about, but she claims that faces are mostly blurry — although she apparently reads lips to a certain degree to help with the hearing issue. And she’s hit and miss being able to see what’s happening when she watches TV. (Hits: Horse racing and sports when the teams are wearing distinctive enough colors. Misses: Anything with text on the screen or that changes too quickly, as far as I can tell — although she has a standard-def TV set which can’t possibly be helping.)

Anyway: Skype was a hit. She claimed to be able to see my parents quite clearly on my 15” MacBook Pro screen and I could tell she had a very easy time hearing them — a definite surprise considering the relatively weak quality of the laptop’s speakers. But they held their conversation and then did the sort of usual first time Skype user tricks of aiming the laptop camera at different things and showing off the cat.

Now. For me — and for you — this is nothing new. In fact, it’s easy to slip into a weird sort of elitist “oh, crap — the family found Skype” thing, as if (as with e-mail and online chat) this going to lead to some increased level of annoyance as the noobs start using these things all wrong. And Skype itself as both a (former) company and as a software service has all this baggage attached to it, and blah blah blah.

But grandmother’s mind was blown.

Which expressed itself in a couple of ways:

1) The degree of connection it gave her with my parents amazed her. She was right there. They were right here. She could see their house. My mom could comment on her turkey sweater. Grandma even said at one point, “You could just put a bunch of these around the table to have everyone over for dinner.” This sounds simplistic, but grandma does not do much brainstorming about technological innovations in her day-to-day. And she had a little melancholic emotional moment when we shut down the chat, like she had been dropped back into the real world where the family was actually a couple thousand miles away in Texas and not just sitting across the table.

2) After the Skype call she asked me all about what just happened. Again: Grandma decided a while back that she Just Doesn’t Understand Computers, so this was a rather rare occurrence, having to get into explaining how, exactly, we just did this rather futuristic thing on her dining room table. I did my best, but we’re talking about someone with an extremely low level of technological literacy.

She clearly wanted something like this, so one question was: “How much does a device like this cost?” “Well, it’s a piece of software that runs on my computer. This is the same computer I use for work and other stuff.” Confusion. She doesn’t seem to understand the distinction between a computer as a piece of hardware and application software that runs on the computer. She thinks in terms of unified devices. Like the telephone, TV set, or dishwasher. “So the software and that call were free,” I continued. Again, confusion. “And do the neighbors use something like this?” “Yeah, probably.” Anyway: This sort of conversation continued.

It’s nice to occasionally be reminded that we’re living in a bizarre future, and that it’s pretty cool. I do things regularly that feel so pedestrian — and yet would shock someone just ten or twenty years ago. Remember those AT&T “You Will” ads from the mid-90s? Go back and watch them. Video calls? On-demand movies? Checking e-mail on the beach? Sci-fi concepts. Now imagine you were born before radio became a thing.

(As a quick aside: I have a feeling that text messages seem like some kind of psychic connection from my grandmother’s vantage. Like, we’re taking a walk and I blurt out, “Oh, Christin’s having burgers with her dad in Florida.” But she didn’t see me check my phone or anything (remember, hard of sight). I don’t know exactly how she envisions I got that transmitted nugget of info, but (to wear out a term) let’s go with “magic.”)

(Another quick aside: I suspect my mom will get around to reading this post to her. It’s happened before. Surely grandma has no concept of a “blog,” as she doesn’t use the web. So he may not realize that damned near anyone on this planet can read what I write here instantly, just a second after I publish it. Obvious to you and I. But not necessarily to her. And quite amazing, again, once you kind of step back and appreciate the technology. Even though Twitter was totally down for, like, fifteen minutes the other day and it totally sucked why can’t they get their act together the internet is so fucking stupid.)

So, yeah. Not sure how much grandma actually understood about how the tech worked. But clearly the call was a huge success, so I started considering how to get grandma access to Skype more regularly. My thought: Get grandma an iMac with Apple Remote Desktop. Set it up. She literally never has to touch the thing — I just get into her computer remotely and bring up Skype. We may instead use an old laptop, which she’d have to at least touch to open the lid, but would otherwise work the same. We’re considering getting her a new flat-screen TV, and some of those have apps (including Skype). But I just don’t trust the user experience and there’s almost no way (I think) the grandma would be able to navigate any kind of menus or whatever to make it work. But. After a couple years of trying to get her to agree to let us buy her a new, nice flat-screen TV — I think she finally acquiesced. And my theory is that she saw things well on my laptop screen and the whole experience of “living in the future” kid of jostled her a bit. Maybe the new things do work a bit nicer than the older things.

And so on.

PS. And only very obliquely related: I eventually have to write up at least a little something about my other teaching experiences this autumn. I’ve been teaching a web programming class at ITP (NYU) and co-teaching with Bob Giraldi a more conceptual class over at SVA called “The Interactive Idea.” And they’re not exactly the same as the above, obviously, but I have sort of similarly been forced to retrace my own steps a bit and break down what I know about technology into digestible chunks for my students and it’s a pretty revealing experience, for sure.

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Scenes from South Carolina

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Our friends Nick and Nancy had their wedding down in Hilton Head, South Carolina on Saturday. (Congratulations!) I’ve never spent any time in that part of the country, so Christin and spent a few days in Charleston, as well. We went out last Wednesday and were supposed to come back Monday night, but crappy weather in the Northeast caused our flight to be cancelled and we wound up getting home yesterday, Tuesday. Apart from that flub, we had an awesome time. Charleston is very charming. Hilton Head doesn’t have quite the urban charm, but the beach is gorgeous and we got some solid R&R time on the beach and by the pool.

Anyway, I’m not going to get too much into the gritty details, here — but I thought I’d post some photos for everyone. Not a full account of everything we did. Just some… stuff.

First: Some photos from our first day walking around Charleston:

In Charleston, we stayed at Two Meeting Street Inn (in the Music Room) — possibly my best hotel/lodging experience ever. The building had previously been an old home and they left it furnished as such. And the staff were the utmost of southern hospitality. And the porch was perfect for hanging out on while drinking iced tea and eating whatever little sweets they happened to have out.

That first night we ate at Husk, which we enjoyed.

And Thursday we took the ferry out to Fort Sumter. By the way: The weather through our entire trip was hot and sticky. Especially at Fort Sumter, but all over Charleston and Hilton Head. Whew.

And, of course, the wedding — our reason for being out there in the first place. Nick’s family had a home on the beach, so they held the ceremony right there. Gorgeous spot! We even had a few spectators…

And the reception… Some teenage rock band played covers for the first few hours down kind of in some park. Pretty good, especially considering that they looked to be around 15. “Barracuda” was a hit, of course. Otherwise: More drinks, some food, toasts, dancing, and such!

We had a rental car for the drive back to the airport at Charleston, so we took some time after lunch to visit an Boone Hall Plantation. The house itself had been rebuilt in the 1920s, but there were original slave homes and other buildings scattered about. Interesting stuff (and the home itself — currently someone’s real home, by the way — was pretty cool).

And so that’s that! We’re back home in Brooklyn, now. Back to work…

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Civilization

Sunday, July 10, 2011

I did it. I bought Civilization V. Off of Steam (which I quite like, by the way). They had it discounted as a part of their Summer Camp Sale promotion. And, honestly, I’ve been reading about the game for months and I just couldn’t help myself. Don’t judge me.

My experience with the Civilization series of games goes way, way back. I actually remember the first time I heard about it: Two friends (Jason and Yirong) were talking about the original game on the bus home after school one day during what must’ve been 9th grade (circa 1992). An odd conversation about playing as the Germans or Aztecs or whatever and fighting battles and dealing with barbarians and such. “I realized they had settled on the other end of my continent!” It all seemed kind of mysterious, and even at age 14 or 15 these terms of history and culture carried enough weight that hearing them mixed up into bizarre and unreal configurations seemed pretty novel. Enough so that I still kind of remember the conversation (loosely).

Anyway, somehow I got my hands on a version for my little old black-and-white Mac Classic. Probably from Floppy Joe’s, Austin’s computer game rental place that eventually folded (I suspect) after lawyers got involved and accused them of facilitating exactly what I did to get a copy of Civ for myself: Piracy.

(I should make a side note about Floppy Joe’s. First, I really can totally bring to mind the feel and layout of the place as I sit here just now. It sat up near 29th and Guadalupe in Austin TX, right next door to where the famous Toy Joy now sits. It’s a place my mom probably remembers, as well, since she took me there fairly often after I got my first Mac. They rented computer games, which really kind of meant that the games with decent copy protection got rented and the ones without got pirated. And most Mac games back then didn’t have very good copy protection. So that’s how I wound up with stuff like Civilization, Kid Pix, Spectre, Oids, Prince of Persia, Zork Zero — games I could never have afforded to buy. Piracy is one of those very hard topics to deal with because on one hand, yes, I knew that my behavior skated on the bad side of the law. But I had so many seminal moments with games and just interactive “stuff” in general that I got from Floppy Joe’s — I think there’s a good chance that I wouldn’t be where I’m at today as far as working creatively with technology if I hadn’t had those experiences. I also remember being exposed there to stuff like shareware for the first time (back when shareware came on floppies you’d buy for a few bucks (yes, yes, yes — and BBSes)) and, of course, the vast world of PC gaming which I had no way to really participate in — although I could check out the boxes and try to imagine what was going on.)

Anyway, I played the hell out of it. Civilization’s a remarkably addictive game. I remember phases of playing this game to the point of having dreams about military units moving around on the square grid and forming boundaries and blockades and skirmishing, building cities, trading, etc. On the one hand, I feel like surely there must’ve been something better I could’ve been doing with my time (I’m going to guess that this impacted my schoolwork). But then, looking back, I don’t think Civilization is quite the worst game a kid could spend his or her time glued to. For one thing, every single element of the game has some sort of historical underpinning. For example (and, honestly, I could be talking about Civ 1 or Civ 5 twenty years later — the core game is almost identical): You start with one single band of settlers in 4000BC and play the game on a randomized planet full of islands and continents with a collection of competing civilizations. You might, say, play the Romans. And in this random world a bunch of other civilizations — the Germans, Americans, Zulu, Indians, etc — are also trying to grow and flourish. But the game tries to make the world “feel” like the world as it stood circa 4000BC and later 1AD and 1500AD and 1996AD not by flashing a title card and announcing “Now You’re in the Industrial Age!” but by incrementally taking you from one phase of history to the next with things like the technology tree (where you must first spend some years researching agriculture which then lets you research horseback riding and eventually on to other more advanced technologies like gunpowder and semiconductors). So in a sense it kind of was a game about how resources and the sort of random arrangements of land and the starting points of civilizations along with their tendencies towards things like science or war can lead to different results for different people thousands of years down the line — kind of a gamified version of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Which may sound obvious. (I’m certainly not the first person to make that connection.) So I do wonder how much this one game might’ve influenced my outlook on how the general flow of global history works. I did, after all, play it well before I ever read Guns, Germs, and Steel.

I also remember picking up a certain amount of vocabulary from the game. “Phalanx” and “trireme,” for example, are words which I first saw in Civilization which I them went and looked up and learned what meant. (The Extra Credit video series has a great piece up about this called “Tangential Learning” — written by the same James Portnow as the previous link.) This stuff does also seem important (and literally, like I said, the entire damned game is packed with historic and cultural references — there’s so much to tangentially learn). To me, though, it feels kind of secondary to the bigger picture stuff about learning a perspective on how history “works” on a more fundamental level. But interesting, nevertheless. And healthy, no doubt. I’m going to guess that one major reasons kids do poorly in school — especially in subjects like history — is that they’re expected to memorize the information, but not really use it beyond regurgitation in some way. When you need to know what a phalanx is in order to prevent Napoleon from barging in conquering your cities — you’ll remember what the hell a phalanx is.

And I’m not going to argue that the version of how history works presented in Civilization is really the Way History Really Works. No one has that figured out. But it does present a picture, and I feel like if nothing else it put into my head a starting point — something which I could knock other ideas and experiences up against.

Anyway — that was then. I did pick up Civilization II (at Floppy Joe’s, no doubt) a few years later (still in high school) and played the hell out of that, as well. And that was more-or-less the end of my life with the game.

Until.

They released a kind of lite version of Civilization IV for the iPad last year. Which I couldn’t resist and played around with for a bit. Fun fact: It’s great for flights because it doesn’t necessarily take much thought (or reflexes, since it’s turn-based) but is addictive enough that I can burn through an entire five hour flight playing with it — exactly what someone like me who fucking hates flying needs.

And so I saw Civilization V at a discount on Steam and decided to grab it. And I knew what would happen. Last weekend I kind of felt crappy, so I just played Civ for, like, ten hours over the course of a couple days. Until my brain started viewing everything in my real world fixed into a hexagonal lattice (Civ V uses hexes instead of squares — the most radical change in the game in 20 years, I think). And I made a mental agreement with myself to not play during the work day, but I’ve been sneaking an hour or two here and there while Christin’s out or doing other things in the evenings. And I played about an hour earlier today. (And might play a bit more before dinner!) I don’t have a ton of time and my brain just works differently than in did in the early nineties, so I’m not quite as compelled to just sit for hours and hours and hours playing with it — but certainly if all of my other engagements went away for a weekend I could probably fall into that trap.

So, yeah. One thing I’ve been thinking about during this play-through is just why it’s so crack-like and addictive — if not to everyone, than at least to me. I guess I have a few ideas…

My first idea is simply that when I play Civilization, I’m not just fighting battles and trying to win the game or whatever. My mind constructs a story around the whole thing — a story of my own creation, mostly. And this isn’t really done consciously — at least, I don’t feel like I do something like “Well, now I’m going to sit down and create a narrative.” I think it does have to do with the fact that the names of the peoples, cities, and such are real: I’ve been playing as the Americans, and when you found a city called Philadelphia, immediately my brain has some kind of resonance with that city, even though it has basically nothing to do with the real-world Philadelphia. (My Philly’s landlocked mid-continent and on the edge of a desert.) But I guess it subtly makes you care about these things (or at least have an opinion on them) and it makes the differences between the fake and real cities kind of stick out in starker contrast. My Philly’s on a desert. My Washington has city walls and the Brandenburg Gate. My Atlanta is just about the southernmost city in the world. It gives some connection to the game and it pokes that “what if?” part of my brain. And I guess that pulls me into caring about this new alternate reality history I’m building. I do find the alt history that is created over the course of playing a game to be very engaging and interesting.

The second idea about why I get so hooked isn’t quite as high-minded. In Civ, there’s just never any end to anything. There’s always something in the middle of being built, or in the middle of being fought, or whatever. Since there’s never a clear stopping point mid-game, like there might be in an FPS between levels or scenes or whatever, it’s easy to get locked into an extended period of “oh, just one more thing.” I know I’m susceptible to this because I do the exact same damned thing with the web sometimes: I get locked into these extended cycles of “oh, let me just see what’s on Gawker — then that’s it” through twenty-ish sites that’ll last hours. In a way, the game does play itself to a certain degree, only bothering the player when it’s time to make an important decision. So you can get locked into a trance-like period of pointing and clicking and responding. It’s a game you can watch TV while playing. I’m not sure if this part of the game is good or bad or what, but I do feel like the designers have mastered the art of doling out little rewards at just the perfect rate to make it difficult for people like me to escape the game. (But at least I’m learning about triremes.)

Anyway. These are just a few thoughts on Civilization. I’m enjoying Civ 5, although I’ll probably just finish with this run-though and then shelve it. I don’t need to spend hundreds of hours at it. But it is nice to be reminded of these other bits of my personal history with the Civilization series and games in general…

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Game Design for High Schoolers, Classes #2 & #3

Sunday, May 29, 2011

More notes about the game design class I’m teaching over at the Academy of Urban Planning, a high school in Bushwick.

So. Class #2. Werewolf didn’t happen. I had my fresh deck of cards and everything. But. Only four kids turned up for class due to a field trip — simply too few to play the game with. Sadly. Because I still think it’s a useful educational game because it’s so easily modified and extended. But it looks like I might not have a chance to test that idea since we’re rapidly moving into the actual “make your own game” part of the class. And now that we’re officially into learning GameMaker, I don’t think we can turn back.

GameMaker. Since Werewolf fizzled, we spent most of our second class learning the basics of this mostly drag-and-drop game-making software. (This after another round of get-to-know-yas and a recap of our general definition of what a game is and a review of some terms from the first class.)

Teaching GameMaker is both easier and more complicated to teach than I expected. Easier because all four of the kids got it that first class. We downloaded it, along with a little pack of graphics and sounds that I put together for them to use — mostly simple Nintendo sprites and a selection of sound effects that come pre-packaged with Mac OS X. And we got it installed in nothing flat on the four machines the kids were using. Great. And then I took them through the basic first steps. First, we made our player character. I had them make a sprite (and reviewed the definition — something that appears on the screen and moves). I had them make an object that used that sprite. I had them make a room. I had them put the object in the room and attach a set of events that made it move in different directions when they pushed the arrow keys on their keyboards. Run. No problem. The kids know how to use computers quite well.

(“Sprite” and “event” are two of our big vocabulary words, by the way.)

I found it a bit difficult to read their reactions, but I think they felt a nice little “whoa” moment when they saw their creations (as simple as they may have been) on screen and were able to interact with them. Processing, the Java-based tool used at ITP to teach programming, sort of had that same philosophy: The faster they can go from zero to seeing something move on the screen, the more students will be willing to learn. I know from personal experience that on professional programming projects there’s a whole list of steps you have to go through before you even get to the point of seeing a blank screen when you run what you’re working on. As experienced as I am, my first time playing around with GameMaker I felt it quite satisfying to just open the software, click on a few things, and poof — simple game that runs right there. Took me five minutes. Took us as a class about maybe 15 minute to get to this first point — really quick, honestly. That was the easy part.

The hard part will be on-going through the remainder of the class. It only consciously occurred to me during our second class that these kids would not be working on their games at home. This ain’t grad school. Or undergrad. Or even, really, normal high school. And when it comes to talking about games and computer stuff at home… Well, okay. This may sound weird for a second, but might as well write about it and see what it looks like on the screen…

I’m a white boy from Texas. My high school happened to be largely black and somewhat hispanic, but there was definitely an unfortunate barrier, for the most part, between the Science Academy kids (mostly white, including me) and the normal student body (mostly not). And maybe that has nothing to do with anything. But — it’s inarguably true that I’ve never been in a high school outside of Texas. Certainly not one in Bushwick. So I feel like I don’t have a clear grasp of what, really, the home lives of these kids might be like. It’s not a huge deal — they all seem reasonably smart, happy, and well-adjusted — but I don’t know what growing up in a minority community in Bushwick is like and so I find myself tripping on my tongue when I ask about things like computers at home. There actually may also be zero racial or geographic element to it — I’m a very hardcore computer user and I’m surrounded by people who are nearly all very hardcore computer users of one flavor or another. Regardless of our incomes, we all have fancy computers and mobile phones and all variety of digital doodads. Maybe this isn’t an issue of me not having a grasp on what the kids tech lives at home might be like — it might be more of an issue of me simply not knowing what the average American’s tech life at home is like. I don’t know. This paragraph feels all sorts of weird and rambling, but I’ll leave it in. I had no solid idea what the kids would be like before I first stepped into the classroom a few weeks ago, but the reality (so far) appears to be that this group of kids is not unlike my little group of nerd-friends in high school. So there’s not a huge cultural bump, but these are all minority kids living in a very different sort of urban environment and that must have some impact on their outlook. Maybe I’m making more out of this than I ought to, but I feel it’s worth being alert about. Anyway.

My point: It dawned on me that I couldn’t assign them homework. So suddenly we’re talking about a total of maybe eight or ten hours to learn enough of GameMaker for them to still have time to make their final project games. Which is the complicated part of teaching GameMaker, because one kid has already started talking about making his own version of RollerCoaster Tycoon (which, as a sim game, is already kind of a make-your-own-game game). And I’m already fielding questions about doing things with GameMaker which I’m sure are possible, but I don’t know if we’ll get to. (Especially given that I’m more-or-less learning this tool along with them.)

But they do seem to pick up what I teach them very quickly and all of them took the reigns and began playing around and experimenting with the software after I taught them each thing. The other stuff we did that first class included making enemies that walk around the screen, making walls to contain the level, and making collision events between the player, enemies, and walls. Basic top-down Legend of Zelda-style stuff.

So. Fast-forward one week to this past Tuesday. Five kids. And computer science teacher Andrew “Mr. Drozd” Drozd assisted instead of the usual Lisa Kletjian (although she stuck around for the first bit of class). More GameMaker. We started with a review of terms, which I think will be the new thing for each class. For those of you playing along at home, our current vocabulary list:

• Strategy
• Interactive
• Triple-A Games
• Indie Games (Interesting to note: Mr. Drozd asked if any of the kids new what “indie” meant. They didn’t. So I had to clarify.)
• Sprite (The non-lemon-lime soda definition.)
• Event
• If-Then
• Loop
• Variable
• Relative (In a mathematical sense, because GameMaker always asks if you, for example, want something position in a fixed place on the screen or relative to something else.)
• XY Coordinates

So we’re getting in a solid set of programming terms, which I like.

Alright. So that happened. And then back to GameMaker.

We had one new kid who missed the previous week, so I felt a little bit of a confusion as to get him up-to-speed without boring everyone else. But two kids immediately opened up their previous projects and started messing around with them (in a good way) and the other two kinda seemed to need a review, anyway, so I just took the new kid and that pair through the steps from the previous week. Funny thing though: One kid — I swear she was just barely awake through the previous week’s class. And seemed kind of uninterested and I had to kind of push her through each step. Not her fault on the drowsiness thing — it’s a long class at the end of a long day for these kids (4-6pm on Tuesdays, remember). But. This past Tuesday when we cracked open GameMaker, she totally remembered how to do everything. And I think actually quite enjoyed working with it. A nice surprise. And the other one who I thought might need a review also didn’t need much of one. And the new kid picked it up quickly. So. Success.

Fun story: During this part of the class I poured myself a glass of pink lemonade (Lisa always provides drinks and snacks for the kids). And then managed to spill it all over my crotch in front of everyone. Good times.

So, we moved on to the new stuff. This time I had on the agenda three things: 1) Bullets. 2) Multiple rooms. 3) Points. And talking about bullets forced me to introduce the term “instance.” And points, of course, required a quick discussion about variables. (As for teaching variables in a computer science context, game lives and points would seem to be excellent hooks to get kids to understand the concept.) And we did get through all of this by the end of class. One kid — the new kid — even got a crazy multi-leveled reverse bullet-hell shooter thing happening with a screen full of enemies and bullets flying absolutely everywhere. Another kid made a maze-like game where one had to maneuver around the level to get to the door to move on. I mean, they only had a few tools at their disposal, so they weren’t going to create a wide range of games, but I was pleased to see they were coming up with different approaches.

Oh: And one kid found a sort of top-down zombie defense game made with GameMaker. And rather well-polished, as well, with good graphics and sounds. Like the zombie level in Call of Duty: World at War (but top-down): You’re in a house with a gun and zombies are trying to break in and you have to kill them before you’re overwhelmed by the flood. Definitely a game like games they had enjoyed before. But. Since made with GameMaker, I could prompt them to think about how the maker of that game might’ve built it. The kids knew how to make a player. They knew walls. Enemies. Bullets. Points. They had all of the pieces to make something like this zombie game. I think it was interesting for them to make that connection.

Another observation: For a couple of the kids, I don’t think they had quite formed in their mind a difference between player and designer. On kid, especially — the bullet-hell kid — seemed to kind of treat the bullets and points as things you might upgrade as a player in a game like Call of Duty. So he made a million bad guys. And then kept increasing the bullet spray until he cold kind of wipe them out no problem. And then he made them each worth some massive amount of points and showed off his, like, 16-digit score. Which is fine — nothing wrong with that sort of experimentation at all. But. Definitely funny. And a little insight into how these kids might think about making games, just the idea that they might need to develop a bit more of a designer’s mentality as something distinct from a player’s mentality. But. Game designers also aim to make experiences that are satisfying. And clearing off a whole screen of hundreds of enemies with a massive barrage of bullets is, indeed, satisfying.

What else? Oh, yeah. I set up the blog on its own domain (hidden from the world, for now, because of privacy concerns — sorry) as to bypass the school’s, ahem, dumb restriction on Tumblr. But we ran out of time and I didn’t get a chance to get the kids going with it. I’m getting worried about this part of the class. I very much wanted to have them contribute to the blog, especially since so much of our in-class time will go towards GameMaker. But it may not come to pass. I’ll give it another shot next week.

So that’s about it. I haven’t fully decided on what we’re going to do next week. I’m guessing a vocabulary run-down, because that’s become our thing to do at the beginning of a class. Might add a couple of new terms in there for ‘em. And then more GameMaker. I’ve tentatively got a few things on the agenda, there: 1) Lives. 2) Scrolling levels. 3) General variables (like having a limited number of bullets and picking up new supplies). 4) Something else I’m forgetting right now.

Actually, I’m like half-sick right now. And sitting up on my roof writing in the dark because the fresh air is nice (and the wifi works up here, which is convenient). So my thinking may be a little generally muddled. But there you have it.

Onward.

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Game Design for High Schoolers, Class #1

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

I wanted to write a few words about the game design class I’m teaching over at the Academy of Urban Planning, a high school in Bushwick. We have our next class tomorrow and I should get get out some thoughts about the first class before things get jumbled.

So, yeah. We had our class. And it went very well, happy to report. We had about nine kids turn up altogether, and they kind of trickled out over the course of our two hours so by the end we had four present. Apparently it’ll take another class or so before they get into the rhythm of staying the entire time. The class is a bit of an elective — and it’s from 4-6pm on Tuesdays through the summer, which is… odd for kids of that age. And that class schedule really feeds into my feeling that I’m teaching a graduate school class for 15 and 16-year-old. Or, at least, an ITP class for kids that age: The first class was definitely very conversational and I’m trying to let the kids guide me as much as possible towards what they want to learn. And like an ITP class, everyone’s going to have a group project due at the end… We’re going to make simple games with YoYo Games’ GameMaker software, a fun little casual game-making tool I’ve been playing with for the past few days. Perfect for building some early-era Nintendo-style 2D creations. (And which Brad Hargreaves over at General Assembly actually recommended to me — good call on that!) I think the kids will have fun with that.

Anyway: More about this first class. Before we started, one kid introduced himself and mentioned that he’d googled me and watched my Ignite talk — a good sign. And during the class he talked and talked about games — very engaged, and even a little self-conscious that he was chattering too much. I was pretty excited at the engagement. And to see that the other kids were mostly into it, as well — especially the ones who remained as the class went along. Everyone talked. Everyone seemed more-or-less comfortable, although these are high school kids and prone to goofy awkwardness (something I’ve tooooootally grown out of). But I felt a good vibe and nice energy as we went along.

So what did we do? Well. I had very neatly picked out a few casual online games for us to play together a lead-in to some conversations about different kinds of games. (See my last post on the matter.) Two things happened, though:

1. Fun fact: Schools have content blockers. And those content blockers block games. (And Twitter. But not Facebook or YouTube, which surprised me.) So my game selections we a no-go.

2. Honestly, after getting to know them a bit… These kids mostly seemed to have XBOXes and Wiis. Or, at the very least, they had spent a fair amount of time playing games online. My game selections felt kind of dinky and a bit below what they were already used to. I don’t need to introduce teenagers to video games. They pretty well know them.

I had to do something, though, so Lisa (the woman who helped me teach that day) and I clicked around trying to find some games that the blocker had missed. Found some terrible ones clearly for elementary schoolers which just sucked. But during this one of the kids found an HTML 5 version of Lemmings that someone had created, so we wound up playing that, each kid pulling it up on their computer screen and playing for 10-15 minutes. And then discussion. Which led into the meat of the class:

What is a game?

This is when things got interesting. I started doing my thing, prompting them to think about games they’d played and what made them different from a non-game. And it really didn’t take them any time to hit on the key things. Goals. Rules. Strategy. Etc. We went through and talked about the features of games and I tried to push the boundaries of their thinking a bit, toward things like: What makes a game bad (which one kid entertainingly hijacked into an elaborate rant against ET for the Atari 2600, which came out when he was, like, -14)? And we talked about level design. Like, when playing Lemmings, how were the levels ordered? You have all of these powers and controls… Did you start out with access to all of them or just some? That kind of thing. Again, they got it very quickly. They play games all the time. They know about increasing difficulty.

And this was one of the major takeaways, I think. And why I think this is an important sort of class. These kids do play games all the time. And they put a fair amount of thinking into them and I’m sure that almost every kid there has had moments when they’ve mentally stepped back a bit and considered in a more abstract sense what they’re doing when they’re playing a game. But. I don’t think they ever get to talk about this stuff, at least not in a way where they’re allowed to think about it and get a little bit of direction from an adult. Or validation that it’s not a flat-out waste of time. Almost certainly not at school. At least not in an official sense — I bet there are teachers who play games and talk about them a bit with the kids. Maybe? I don’t know. At any rate, I felt like I had a subject at my disposal that the kids both wanted to talk about and were already, to a certain degree, experts on. Just without realizing it.

And in a broader sense, I want to see more classes like this taught in high schools because I know that kids have different sorts of brains and I feel like game design (like computer science) appeals to a kind of systems thinking which brains like mine do very well with. I happened to be smart enough to skate by and do reasonably well in high school, but I felt like my classes very rarely connected with the way my brain really liked to learn. Most of the stuff I really enjoyed learning about I kind of just did on my own. I definitely kind of created my own personal curriculum during high school and definitely college, not limited to technology by any means, but certainly that’s where I picked up my mad computer skills. I’m good with computers.

Anyway: I think there’s room, here, to appeal to some kids who might not’ve connected to a subject yet at school and get them excited. And slip in some computer programming, geometry, and art talk while we’re at it.

Big picture stuff.

Tomorrow is class #2. Werewolf day. More reports afterwards, I’m sure.

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Two Classes on Game Design

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Yeah, so it looks like I’ve got an exciting week coming up. (I also think I sort of broke the “s” key on my laptop’s keyboard — it sometimes doesn’t trigger when I hit it. And until I have evidence to the contrary, I’m going to blame the cat. But that’s an issue for another day.)

So. I’m leading two classes next week, in two very different educational contexts. On Tuesday, I’m doing my first day of a class called “Play” — an eight-week summer class for high school kids about game design. Then on Thursday I’m doing a talk over at General Assembly on my usual subject of the past year-or-so, game design and social media. A couple hours with 9th and 10th graders. A couple hours with industry people. I’m expecting that by Friday I will have another interesting blog post rarin’ to go…

Anyway. Let’s take these one by one.

Tuesday. I’m honestly most nervous about this one. I’ve done professional talks before, and they’re fairly nerve-wracking (especially Ignite — yes). But. I essentially know my audience, I know what they want, and I can at least predict how I think they’re going to respond to me. For example, I know I can go and talk for about an hour straight on a fairly esoteric topic and people will sit there and politely lend me their ears (I hope). I will be confident that I can just blab what’s on my mind and people will be basically on my same page a far as context. We’re all social media players, we know what the big issues and common complaints of the day are, we know most of the same memes. We all spend our days sitting in front of the same internet.

But. I do not think this is going to be the case on Tuesday, with this group of kids. Now, I expect them to be reasonably tech-savvy. In fact, I sat in on fifteen-twenty minutes of Andrew “Mr. Drozd” Drozd’s computer class last Wednesday and got a taste of what their level of sophistication is. Just saying this makes me feel like grandpa, but: They’re already well beyond where the average high schooler was when I was in high school. Granted, there’s way more stuff for them to explore — I’m not saying my peers were tech-dumb. But I think these kids will have a basic knowledge of what, say, Facebook is and how social networking online works. They might even have some programmer-mindset sorts of mental stuff going on — I’m sort of convinced that if you enjoy using technology at a young enough age there’s almost no way you can’t develop a programmer’s mentality about computers. As you explore and push the boundaries of Facebook, for example, you’ll get to understand computer logic and flow and how things fit together conceptually. I think. Maybe I’ll be wrong, here. Which is part of the reason I’m so excited to teach this — I just want to see how kids use technology. I know how tech nerds use technology.

I’m also hoping that this “programmer mindset” thing is happening with some of these kids simply because I think the game designer mentality is very, very similar. Game design is all about creating complex and purposeful systems and making sure those system work as intended, while making sure there are no holes or exploits that will break them or make them un-fun. You may not need to explicitly know what a for-loop is, but you do need to be able to mentally run through many, many “what ifs” and think about how the players are going to interactive with whatever you create.

So, yeah. I think this first class on Tuesday will be a couple of things. The biggest: Simply me feeling them out so I can get a read on what their mindset about gaming is already. They play games. That I’m confident of. They doubtless play many more games than they even realize, and I think game design is also a very interesting subject to talk to kids about because it’s quite possible that they play more different games for longer periods of time than almost any adult does. They probably play sports. Basketball or baseball or whatever. And some Xbox. (Maybe too much Xbox.) And they seem to have Facebook accounts, so I’d be surprised if some weren’t into social games like Farmville. No doubt they get distracted while online and find casual games to mess with, as well. They might play board games. Checkers? Chess? There’s probably some casual gambling of some sort happening. Who knows. But this is the kind of stuff I want to get a read on. Before I do, I don’t think I can make any sort of concrete plan of action for the coming weeks.

I’ve also found a handful of online games for us to play together (with special thanks to the fine folks at ask.Metafilter for their many suggestions). I don’t think we’ll get through them all, and I’m really hoping that they’ll have some games in mind to play in class — but I’ll list ‘em here, anyway. Maybe you’ll find something you enjoy. These are, by the way, games I’m hoping they can play in five or ten minutes and get the essence of the experience.

Casual games:

• Canabalt
• Bejeweled

Strategy games:

• Desktop Tower Defense

Games as art or personal expression:

• Passage
• Every Day the Same Dream

Cooperative games:

• Fire Boy & Water Girl

Puzzlers:

• notpron. (Although, jeez — a name like that makes me nervous about using it in class.)

Anyway — you may know much better examples of these kinds of games (or other kinds of games I’m missing altogether). Hit me up in the comments, please, if you have ideas. But you get where I’m kind of going. And I hope to take the class through a few of these games during our couple of hours.

One final comment: The part that makes me the most nervous is simply the possibility that some kids just won’t care. That I’ll have to fight to get some to pay attention or that I’ll be exhausted just keeping conduct in line or whatever. I’m going into this assuming that the topic will be enticing enough that I can rely on the kids being fairly interested. If nothing else, if I sense that I’m losing them, I can totally switch gears. It’s nice not having to teach against a prescribed curriculum. But we’ll see.

It’s all a big experiment.

And then, yeah: Thursday. At General Assembly.

So Mike Dory put Brad Hargreaves over there in touch with me (thanks!) — they wanted someone to come talk about game design, I’m always willing to talk about game design, so here we are. The talk has been put together quickly, but I’ve been pondering this topic long enough that I kind of had a nice set of points I knew I wanted to make.

I’m talking about how game design impacts social media design. My grouchy pitch: I’m really tired of all of this “gamification” crap because it’s vastly oversimplifying why game design is so important for people who design other kinds of interactive products. So many people seem caught up in their points and badges — 90% inspired by Foursquare, it feels like. And there’s been this happy-hippie GAMES WILL SAVE THE WORLD thread of conversation which I’m getting tired of because it’s letting people who don’t really have much to say grab everyone’s attention simply and get everyone all excited by just listing all of the things that we can now suddenly fix with a few simple game mechanics: Global warming! Solved. The economy! Fixed. Social inequality! Easy-cheezy. Education! Fixed over my lunch break.

Obviously I’m kind of overstating the case, but I do thing there’s tremendous room in here for a much more nuanced conversation about game design and interactive design. I’m hardly a ground-breaking genius on the subject of either games or social media, but I think I have the right attitude and I’m hoping that I can at least try to point some people in the right direction. It’s all about opening up people’s minds to possibilities. My own, included. I love doing talks mostly because of the amount of research and thinking I am forced to do leading up to them. Even if they cancelled the actual talk, it would be worth it for me.

Brad had me tone down some of the bitchiness in my talk description — with good reason. I promise: My talk will not full of complaints. And even though I get snarky about some game designers when they get all starry-eyed about this sort of stuff, I’m very pleased that this line of conversation has become popular. I do think there’s a lot to learn, here, and I appreciate the idea of people having this conversation amongst themselves — even if they’re sometimes amateurs or just people shooting the shit.

Anyway. More on that later, as well. I’m going to post my talking notes online as I did with my SXSW 2010 talk.

It’s 2am.

Goodnight.

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Book Reviews 2011, Part 1

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Continuing the tradition…

I’ve certainly been packing away the books this year. It’s probably a combination of things: 1) I’ve got free time. 2) I’m becoming a better developer (maybe), so that takes less mental energy and I’m looking for other outlets. 3) I own an iPad which at least removes most of the overhead of having to go out and buy physical books (and eBooks are cheaper). But really: Who knows.

And so, here’s a selection of reviews I’ve left on Shelfari the first three months of this year:

The 25th Hour by David Benioff

“It’s good. I like the set-up: Monty’s last 24hrs before heading off for a stretch in federal prison. And the characters are very well-painted. But it fizzles a little bit at the end and doesn’t wrap things up in a totally satisfying way, which is a bit disappointing. But I like Benioff’s style. City of Thieves is definitely a better work of his, though.” ✭✭✭✭

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

“I don’t know… I kind of hazily cruised through this one. I liked the character of Pnin and the depiction of Waindell but wasn’t really gripped by the story.” ✭✭✭

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

“Hm. So I read this simply because I’m working on a project where we’re throwing around the term “whuffie” quite often. I wanted to make sure I understood where the term came from. And Magic Kingdom is a short read — and free — so why not?

“Overall: I like some of the ideas. I like exploring what happens when people live in a world of total abundance — when they don’t die, they don’t starve, they can totally remake their bodies at a whim, etc. But this book kind of suffers from existing in this universe where Nothing Really Matters: Magic Kingdom is way too light. There’s almost no substance to it. The central plot feels utterly inconsequential. The hundred-plus year-old characters have the wisdom of teenagers. And the moments when the story should take us aside and really explore some of the implications of all of this life-extension, social-currency (“whuffie”) economy, etc stuff — it doesn’t. Which is a shame.

“Anyway: It’s a fun read. A quick read. Just lacking in substance.” ✭✭✭

American Splendor by Harvey Pekar

“This is really the kind of storytelling I like best, the sort of slice-of-life stuff. I guess it’s the depiction of the little moments of beauty or epiphany in plain life… It helps me step back and appreciate the details in my own mundane world a bit more. Good stuff.” ✭✭✭✭✭

A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut

“Just a guy talking about life and stuff. A mellow read. Good for getting a little perspective.” ✭✭✭✭✭

Death by Black Hole by Neil deGrasse Tyson

“I enjoy reading about physics and astrophysics. And while I don’t have much of a mathematical background in those sciences (beyond the basics), I took enough classes in high school and undergrad (and have read enough books with interest) that I feel like I know a thing or two about what goes on up there.

“Tyson (whom I find utterly charming on television) doesn’t break any new ground in science — this isn’t a book about string theory or any other single cutting-edge topic. (Most of it’s not even about black holes.) What this book is, rather, is a series of science essays, each one tackling one specific piece of the astrophysics puzzle and explaining it in a very approachable, understandable way. In doing this, Tyson builds up a fairly detailed picture of how the universe works without ever getting too complicated or dull.

“So while I felt like I had been exposed to much of this information in the past (in a liberal arts sort of way), I really appreciated the science refresher and I appreciated being taken away from my mundane day-to-day back to a place where I could appreciate space and science. It’s something I used to enjoy — but it’s hard to find the time to fit into an otherwise rather busy life.

“My only criticism is about the last two sections, which were mostly about earthly concerns such as lack of public scientific literacy and the place of religion and intelligent design in science. Tyson and I are on the exact same page on these issues and he, of course, can make his arguments much more elegantly than I could. But. I really don’t need to be convinced of these issues and I really just wanted to hear more about the actual science. And it ended the book on a kind of oddly combative note.

“So: Great book! It’s a relatively quick and easy read given the subject matter and Tyson’s almost as charming on the printed page as he is on TV.” ✭✭✭✭✭

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