mattmac

Not sure how much I can say, but I know I can say that Boku will be shipping as a product for the XBox in the next 12 months. Huzzah :)

Okay, this is just plain super-beautiful.

 

I Lived on the Moon is a short-form animation by Yannick Puig. 

 

It combines CG, stop-motion animation (simulated using After Effects,) scratchy film grain, and deep, powerful archetypal imagery to create a world of sad beauty and swirling nostalgia.

 

The muted tones and shadowy landscape speak strongly of the eastern european visual tradition, but Mr. Puig appears to be French.

 

Watch it and be amazed at the power of individual vision.

 

The entire video is available on the site - it takes a little while to download. The site shares lots of interesting tidbits about his creative process, tools, and influences.

 

Programming is good for you. Even if you don't program for a living, programming stretches your mind in ways that are very beneficial.

 

Think about it. Even if you're just working on something boring like a calculator program, your brain has to simulate what the computer is going to do so that you can construct your plan correctly. When something goes wrong, you again simulate many different possibilities mentally to form a theory about the bug - and to correct it.

 

Simulation itself is a very interesting special case of programming. Building a sim is like a multidimensional form of writing a story. You're not writing one story; you're construction a story space in which an huge number of different stories can happen.

- story: keep track of who did what when

- sim: keep track of who can do what and what new possibilities will emerge if they do it

 

Learning to simulate complex systems in your head is great practice for a lot of jobs - like running non-profit organizations, effecting social change, or running a car dealership.

 

And simulation, as we know, is just a polite word for gaming.

Academia is noticing. Two interesting events this year:

- The MacArthur Foundation awarded a grant to create a game design high school in New York

- CMU created the Center for Computational Thinking, to extend systems / simulation thinking into other domains

 

Programming - the fourth R?

99.9% of everything sucks. It takes a combination of timing, luck, talent, perseverence, and insight to create something truly cool. We all make stuff that sucks for different reasons; we get bored, distracted, don't do our homework, etc.

 

We all have our moments of outstanding quality as well.

 

How do we connect with .01% of content that we really want? The "miracle" of modern media conglomeration is content filtering. Sometimes this works really well; I wouldn't know about any of my favorite music if there hadn't been an arbitrating record company pimping their tracks worldwide so that I could find a great Manchester freak band from all the way in Santa Cruz.

 

So mediation serves a useful purpose.

 

Unfortunately for those media conglomerate dudes, disintermediation is even better, because it scales. Someday before too long, I'll find my next favorite band through a really good recommendation system that lets millions of listeners review content from thousands of bands. The wisdom of the masses is incredibly powerful, and the really good part is that one million editors can review and evaluate a lot more content than one hundred. That's the theory; unfortunately, this model has not really worked out for music. That's a topic for a later post.

 

For the game industry, there are different content challenges. If you've spent more than ten minutes in Second Life, you've experienced the User-Generated-Content-Sucking problem first-hand. Awkwardly scaled textures, cardboard buildings, blindingly hideous animated GIFs, you know. Not good.

 

The fix in this case is in the tools. If you want to give users the ability to make games, don't hand them polygon editors. You want their ideas, not their vertex manipulation capabilities. Put another way, if you want your users to make movies for you, make them directors - not scenery carpenters.

 

What I'm talking about, as many of you have guessed, is procedural artwork.

 

What we want is a content engine that has rules for growing things like trees, rocks, and even buildings. There is good technology out there for encoding architectural rules so that an infinite number of unique buildings can be generated randomly - or with guidance.

 

In the game development environment of the (near) future, all of us will be powerful "directors" with an army of talented robot artists at our disposal. We get to focus on the big picture - where the buildings go, how they connect - while the software figures out how the individual bricks are arranged, and how the mortar is applied around window frames.

 

The direction we want to go is that game creation becomes a process of transcribing vision directly into the machine. We just need to give the machine a rich enough language.

 

I worked for Larry Tesler back in the 90s. He's always remained one of my favorite people for his combination of intelligence, creativity, realpolitik, and a deep and genuine desire to make computers and the world a lot better.

 

Larry was VP of Advanced Products at Apple when I was on the Newton team. I worked on a prototype, large-format version of the Newton called Bauhaus, which used an object-oriented dynamic language derived from Lisp (Scheme) called Dylan. Dylan was a great language, and Bauhaus was one of the coolest pieces of software I ever worked on. I did the user interface and interactive graphics layers.

 

At this time, Larry was of course a full-time manager, but he did have his five-year sabbatical coming up. Me and three other folks (Jim Grandy, Yu-Ying Chow, and Mikel Evins) were given four months to prove that Dylan was performant enough to deliver a compact and compelling user experience on the larger Newton. (we did) After the first few months, Larry decided to spend his sabbatical writing code with us. I frequently slept in the office over that frantic, beautiful summer, literally waking up, stumbling over to my Mac, and dropping right back into the code I had left the previous night. It was a great time, and we did some great things - for another conversation.

 

So I'm reading What the Dormouse Said, (see previous) and realizing that Larry was not just the brilliant manager I had known, but had spent his own grungy all-nighters in his youth inventing things like, y'know, pop-up menus. The event loop. Bit blitted graphics. Icons. The modeless user interface. Sigh. Newton, malformed, beautiful mutant that it was, was part of a history for him that went back to the first foundations of the modern user interface. I kind of knew - but I never quite ... realized.

 

Do we ever realize how truly cool people are while we're still with them, or is it always just fond remembering?

 

UPDATE: Yes, Larry Tesler is alive and kicking. We just work in different places now :)

In boku, you can credibly build your own little game. But you're on an island - you can play your game, and someone can come to your house and play your game.

 

The next step would be that you can email your game to someone.

 

What we *really* want is to be able to seamlessly integrate sharing - so you can share your games by clicking on a button, and see what other games people have shared. And which ones are cool (rating system) and which people are making a lot of cool games (reputation system.)

 

When we all learned coding, we exchanged code all the time.

 

Our group is called Creative Systems. We were thinking of calling it Creative Communities, but that is a lot of syllables and a little stiff. So we decided that "creative" implies "community."

 

Does it?

 

Still at Etech, post my boku presentation.

 

On the way down I was reading John Markoff's fantastic newish book What the Dormouse Said. It's about the birth of the personal computer at SRI and PARC starting in the sixties.

 

It's pretty amazing what those funky old geezers were pulling out of the ether in the SIXTIES. Makes me feel like we've been doing an awful lot of resting on their laurels.

 

Logo was released in 1967. Douglas Engelbart's breakthrough GUI demo was in 1968. Lisp never went mainstream, but at least we've have some crazy new scripting languages around. I'm happy about C#, but GEE where's our revolution gone?

 

Wrote a rant/screed a few months back about how we should turn the XBox 360 into a cheap monster workstation for schools. Public schools. With really cheap (dare I say public domain) educational content, great content frameworks like XNA and XBox Live, and, y'know, boku for the little kids.

 

I remember back in the early 80's sneaking into the computer center at UCSC to play with their raster terminals. Gigantic CRTs that could display a full-screen color image. XBox makes these look like a lite brite. And, because it's a commodity, it's just getting cheaper. Developing sophisticted media for the PC is a pain because no two PCs are the same - what looks great on one won't run on another, so you have to do common-denominator stuff. On the 360, you know what you're running against.

 

Most educational media is crappy because the common denominator for school pc hardware is barbaric. Fixing that for $300 a pop seems like a no-brainer - maybe then we'd see amazing molecular simulators in high schools rather than grainy animated gifs.

 

I dunno, I like that idea.

 

Just an idea, though, folks. Not a "secret product." :)