robots, atari, and airports

Two friends have released books worth taking a look at.

First, Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has written "Wired for War."  I was lucky enough to read an early copy and found it an insightful and occasionally disturbing read. Robots intersect with virtual worlds in many different ways, so Pete's book raises a host of issues that also will eventually apply to virtual worlds. You can hear Pete talk about his book with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air."

Second, Ian Bogost, author, game developer, and professor at Georgia Tech has written a new book, "Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies)." Racing looks at how the VCS hardware, and the ecosystem around VCS development, shaped the games that were created for it and, ultimately, game development as a whole.

One more thing. Ian has just released an iPhone version of Jetset: a Game for Airports. Boing Boing already picked it up, so you probably already heard about it. In case you haven't, Jetset is a delightful parody of airport security and a pretty solid casual iPhone game. I've been beta testing it while Jetset managed to pass the tortuous meta-game of Apple iPhone App approval, so it's great that it is out. It's a cheap thrill, check it out!

something to wash away the swoopo aftertaste

I remember seeing the first screen shots of Love earlier this year, but Rock, Paper, Shotgun just posted a movie.  Eskil Steenberg is one talented dude.  Beautiful visuals, a commitment to user expression and creativity, and totally old school software rendering.  What's not to like?


Eskil's blog is pretty interesting as well, especially the many posts that read almost exactly like Linden discussions from 2000 or 2001.

congratulations, cryptic!

Looks like my friends at Cryptic Studios are now working for Atari (again, for some of them). Given the projects Cryptic has in the pipe, this seems like a pretty good deal on all sides. We may all be in a recession, but great tech and great teams seem to always be in demand!

star raiders living room mods

Wil Wheaton talks about playing Star Raiders on an Atari 400:

When I was 10 or 11, I arranged a TV tray, a dining room chair, and a worn blanket to make a small tent in front of our 24-inch TV set. I carefully moved our Atari 400 onto the tray and plugged Star Raiders into the cartridge slot. I flipped the power on, picked up the joystick, and booted up my imagination as I sat in the command chair of my very own space ship. For the next hour, I was a member of the Atarian Starship Fleet. I was all that stood between the Zylon Empire and the destruction of humanity. Through my cockpit’s viewscreen (developed at great expense by the RCA corporation back on Earth) I blasted Zylon starships and Zylon basestars, and I would have defeated them all, if my meddling mother hadn’t made me stop and eat dinner!

Other than my viewscreen being developed by Sony, this is an eerily familiar story.  Were all mothers actually Zylon spies, paid to disrupt the resistance?

Star Raiders, along with Rally Speedway, were probably the two games I played the most on my Atari 400.  Star Raiders, because it had so many ways to play -- do you just run away and turn it into tail gunner? try to finish the game without docking at a base? -- and it was like playing Star Wars and was the first person game to play until Behind Jaggi Lines! leaked out into the Atari underground.  Rally Speedway, because it was multiplayer and let you make your own tracks!  Incredibly impressive stuff for 8-bit computers.

Oh, and Dog Daze, the most perfectly balanced two-player combat game ever.  I shudder to think how much time my friend John and I spent playing that game.

magic card divestment, kudos to card kingdom

While building the arcade game Magic: the Gathering -- Armageddon I, along with most of the team, spent a lot of time playing the card game Magic: the Gathering.  A lot of time.  For those not familiar with Magic, Richard Garfield created the modern interpretation of collectible card game when he created Magic in 1993.  It is a wonderful game and one that I still enjoy playing when I get the chance (which unfortunately isn't often).

A downside of Magic is that you accumulate a ton of cards.  A few weeks ago we were cleaning the garage and I decided it was finally time for the collection to go.  Having neither the time nor patience to eBay the valuable ones as singles, I sent the most valuable 200 or so to Card Kingdom in Seattle.  Huge shout out to Card Kingdom for having a really well designed site, clear instructions, easy submission process, and rapid turnaround.  Certainly I could have made more money off of eBay, but the time savings was dramatic.

best wii game ever

I ordered "Boom Blox", the Steven Spielberg/EA Wii game, after reading the Ars review.

Best. Wii. Game. EVAR.

Go get it, especially if you have kids.

whirled open beta

Whirled, Three Ring's latest project, is now in open beta! Whirled is a mix of flash games, flash 2.5D virtual worlds, user generated content, social networking, social media, and a marketplace. Although my poor Macbook Air can't play all the games, the less CPU-traumatizing were fun. Whirled integrates well with the web, although sometimes you wish you had more screen realestate.

Definitely go check it out!

Congratulations to Daniel and the rest of the Whirled team. I think this is a great example of where you can go if you bet on the Web as the platform. It will also be loads of fun to watch how the experience of Whirled shapes Raph's Metaplace. Both Raph and Daniel would likely be quick to point out that Metaplace and Whirled are different, which they are, but they do rhyme. They will also share both audience and creators, so we'll get to watch how great ideas are expressed on both platforms.

spore bumper sticker

Saw a "Spore 09 2008" bumper sticker driving home. Guess that means the release date is now solid. Here's hoping the Mac release comes at the same time!

apoc week 2

Last night was the second meeting of our APOC class at USC. We're still tinkering with the format of the class, but a major component is a review of news from the previous week. Appropriately enough, last week we had raised Scrabulous as an online community and business to watch - both because of the clear legal risks and the superb design and execution.
Lo and behold, a week later, Scrabulous is all over the news and we're all on the edge of our seats to see how it plays out.

Part of the homework for week one was to explore various wikis and blogs in order to select the best options for their own blogs and the class wiki. On the wiki side, the usual suspects were explored but two -- wetpaint and pbwiki -- were nearly uniformly selected. Why?

Video tutorials. "When I use it, I don't feel stupid."

How obvious is that? Well, probably not obvious enough to tech geeks, but obvious to everyone else. How much more conversion would difficult products -- like virtual worlds -- get if their front pages had a friendly human showing them how to use them?

Much of the class' work is also moving its way online. Check them out. You'll learn about wikis, a review of the Aspen Institute's report on "Next Generation Media," an overview of tech blogs, and an argument for why Scrabulous should be saved.

I can't wait to hear what the class has to say about virtual worlds and games.

how many points for infringe?

Well, it looks like Hasbro has finally noticed Scrabulous. For those who don't already play Scrabulous, it is a wonderful Facebook App that allows you to play Scrabble against your friends. Very well designed and easy to use -- an excellent example of building an app well. If Hasbro is smart, they'll just buy Scrabulous. After all, it has an audience of players, is already written, and will only get more use if it actually is Scrabble. What is more likely to happen is that Hasbro will engage in a protracted legal battle, Scrabulous will be forced to shut down, and Hasbro will replace it with a horribly broken "official" Scrabble app that won't be nearly as well built or easy to use. That will be a shame for the 2.5 million current players.

glossy poster goodness

On Tuesday, I challenged Ian's claim that he could generate poster-sized images form classic game scenes. Of course, it ain't braggin' if you can do it, so Ian responded by creating the Atari Adventure Easter Egg Poster! Very cool. Now I just need a real job so that I can have a wall to hang one of these on.

In separate news, Ian just posted about the impending release of Fatworld, a game about the politics of obesity by Persuasive Games.

raster vector raster vector

Just had the best IM conversation with Ian -- thank you Google for integrating AIM in gmail, which means now I actually monitor my AIM account. He's in the midst of a book about the Atari 2600, which pretty much defines cool in my mind. However, it gets even cooler. Ian decided that rather than just doing screen shots of old games, he'd pull them into Adobe Illustrator to create vector versions of the images, allowing him far more control of the presentation. (He claims to have a poster-sized print of the Atari Adventure Easter Egg, but the only way he'll be able to prove that is to send me one.) We'll have to wait for the book to see them all, but his process resulted in a hilarious moment when he got Cinematronics' Star Castle.

ibogost: I'm running Cinematronics' coin-op Star Castle in an emulator, which is emulating its vector display for my raster display, so that I can take a screenshot of that raster display in order to re-vectorize it in Illustrator for use as a figure in a book

So, vector (original game) as raster (emulated) to vector (Illustrator). What really got us laughing was to keep going, since the Illustrator image will be printed (raster, I think), read by humans (raster, with errors due to Nyquist), and be represented in our brains (vector).

So, to go from Ian's desired shot to the readers' brains, we get: vector->raster->vector->raster->raster->vector

OK, so we thought it was funny.

Ironically, one of the screenshots was being used to demonstrate how the 2600 did hardware collision detection. In our modern, tri-linear, multi-buzworded, hardware accelerated game world, we still tend to use some truly horrible approximations for collision detection. Bounding boxes, spheres, and even polygon-polygon collision detection tend to trade off accuracy for performance, since most cd is done in software on the CPU.

But back in the day, we had glorious, perfect per pixel collision detection done by the hardware! Hell, the Atari computers gave us two players and two missiles worth of hardware cd. Of course, with 2 or 4k of ROM on the cartridge, developers had to take what they could get.

OK, back to my Ajax homework. I'll have words for the "Head Rush" book tomorrow.