Casual Connect 2013: Real-Time Performance at a Massive Scale

by Francois Orsini, VP of Platform Engineering and Chief Architect, Machine Zone

·         Game of War offers real-time gameplay and translation at a massive scale. Their servers have worldwide reach, no language barriers, 5 million to 40 million DAU, 100k to 500k concurrent users, cross platform, and are always on 24/7. Their games offer real-time chat with translations, events with massive parallel broadcasting and auto-subscription model, push notifications, and high availability. Their infrastructure has big scale architecture, is fully distributed and redundant, is cluster native with auto failover, and is cloud aware.

·         Their secret sauce it to know your subject and use the right tools. Pick proven software that are open-sourced. They profile everything and benchmark.

·         Ingredients include…

o    Erlang – a hidden jewel, open-sourced in 1998, supports distributed, fault-tolerant, soft real-time for non-stop apps, concurrent with no locks, hot swapping of code

o    MySQL – proven technology, logical shards and partitions

o    Redis – works with HaProxy/Heartbeat

·         Other tools to thing about – NoSQL (Cassandra, RIAK, Couchbase), MariaDB, PostgreSQL, RDBMS, Continuent Tungsten

Casual Connect 2013: Building Your Game with Google Play

by Bob Meese, Business Development, and Greg Hartrell, Lead Product Manager, Google

·         75% of Android users are playing games. Google Play Game Services offer achievements, leaderboards, cloud saves, and real-time multiplayer. Achievements drive engagement with meta goals, leaderboards encourage competition and engagement, cloud saves allow players to continue their sessions across platforms (Android, iOS, Web), and real-time multiplayer supports 4-player peer-to-peer simultaneous matchmaking and direct to downloads for those who don’t own the app.

·         Google Play Game Services is an Android app that provides one hub for all Android gaming. Players can see games and people, track progress, and discover new games. The SDK can be implemented quickly and it drives user engagement and acquisition. Games that have implemented the SDK have received 40% increase in day 7 retention, 20% increase in play sessions per user per day, and 10% install uplift per day.

·         Get started at developers.google.com/games/services and code.google.com/p/play-games-platform.

Casual Connect 2013: The Power of Touch

by Jesse Schell, CEO, Schell Games

·         Abstract: This talk covers the history of touch games and where touch games are heading in the future.

·         Touch games have swept the world because kids understand touch games intuitively. Even animals can understand how to play a touch game.

·         Humans works with symbolic logic for 3000 years. The computer mouse tapped into the history of tool use which stretches back 3 million years. The history of touch dates back 300 million years. The realm of touching and receiving a response is the realm of the primal.

·         When technology combines philosophy, it’s destiny.

·         Touch is really complicated. There are millions of sensors, and we are only starting to understand itching and tickling. The conscious mind has difficulty understand its own touch. But it’s still very powerful. With Braille, people can absorb so many letters per second.

·         We are still learning touch interfaces on devices. Early touch screens fell victim to heavy arm syndrome, requiring people to hold out their arms for long periods of time.

·         The Nintendo DS, despite many negative feedback before release, became a mega-hit because it managed to do touch well. It did use a stylus and years later, the iOS devices revolutionized touch by using only the finger.

·         “Why would you use a stylus when God already gave you 10?” – Steve Jobs

·         However, there’s still magic in the stylus and the 3-finger grip, especially for artists.

·         School stopped teaching cursive handwriting and even proper typewriting. Now everyone develops sloppy hunt-and-peck typing techniques, which is okay since the current standard interface is the virtual keyboard.

·         We constantly innovative with interface with the Tactus (tactile touchscreen), Senseg (haptic interface), Oculus Rift (virtual reality), Aerial (compressed air feedback), airborne ultrasound, and Kinect (full-body camera vision).

·         Robots haven’t entered our household because we don’t have anything for them to do. The things they can do now like making our beds or brewing us coffee, we can easily do better ourselves. But they will eventually enter to provide us haptic feedback while we’re playing with the Oculus Rift and the Kinect.

Casual Connect 2013: Technical Challenges of HTML5 Development

by Chris Shankland, Lead Developer, Big Viking Games

·         Tools to use

o    Chrome Developer Tools (turn on the experimental tools). Use the profilers – the data profiler, the heat profiler to track memory leaks, and the canvas inspection tool to look at draw calls.

o    jsperf.com for Javascript performance benchmarking.

o    Crankshaft for optimization profiling.

o    Safari Remote Debugger for mobile devices.

o    Webkit Bugzilla for webkit debugging.

·         Performance techniques

o    Don’t use .eval() since it kills optimization.

o    Try-catch blocks cannot be auto-optimized with Crankshaft.

o    Function calls are expensive especially on iOS, so use inline functions.

o    Branching is expensive.

o    Always use the profile.

·         Memory management

o    Javascript is a garbage collected environment and everything creates garbage ([], {}, new, Object.keys, strings, etc.). Mobile makes memory situation exponentially worse.

o    iOS kills your app if it uses too much memory, but how much memory is arbitrary. It will kill the app anywhere between 200mb to 400mb.

o    ECMAScript specifically disallows you from knowing how much memory you’re using.

o    Solutions – create pools, adopt an “our parameter” convention, use Emscripten-style pre-allocation

·         Asm.js is a subset of Javascript that enforces types by casting and allows for ahead-of-time compiling. It’s currently available in Firefox and is spearheaded by Mozilla.

·         The biggest pro of HTML5 is that it allows developers to patch game without submitting to Apple. It’s cross-platform and enables you to keep game in-sync across platforms. Also, since it’s just Javascript, QA can send stack traces and console dumps to developers easily.

·         Make in-app payments done in native code to make it secure from decompiling.

Casual Connect 2013: Welcome to the Microconsole Generation

by Tadhg Kelly, Creative Director, Jawfish Games

·         Summary: Microconsoles (small Android consoles) will make a big splash in the games industry, as it offers an experience that maturing casual gamers are looking for.

·         “Microconsoles” are small Android consoles like the Ouya, Gamestick, Bluestick Gamepop, and the Madcatz Mojo.

·         Imagine a casual gamer who plays lots of games and pays for a few of them. They are frustrated with small mobile games and becomes interested in something else. However, they don’t want a big black hardcore console and they don’t want to buy discs. They will want microconsoles because the business model is something they’re used to (free-to-play downloadable games).

·         As an industry, we like to think about things in paradigms. The games industry will be puzzled with microconsoles blow up. “Why would people buy weak devices? Why would controllers get dumber? Why would games devolve?”

·         Microconsoles will become popular because we like small, simple, easy, immediate, features that suit us, sharing, flexible pricing, playful… all properties of microconsoles.

·         There’s a fidelity fallacy… “people will never buy a A because B is so much better.” But history has proven that people are willing to buy the weaker hardware if it suits them better.

GDC2013 - Live Streaming Video: Social Power to Games

• Integrating live streaming into games, you can incorporate spectator interactions to influence outcomes. For example in sports games, there can be a "home advantage" where the player with more audience support gets a boost in gameplay.
• Millions of people can upload, save, and share their gameplay stories.
• In the future, the number of people watching live games will overshadow the number of players.
• Live stream events are reaching TV broadcast-sized audiences. A network like VH1 lives off an audience of 20,000 and many popular streamed channels can get those numbers.
• In the future, distribution will be everywhere from X-Box Live to Smart TVs to phones.
• Popular streams include Dota 2, League of Legends, The Sims, FIFA, Mario games, and Magic the Gathering. Retro games are also huge.
• To create a good streaming game, you need...

1. ​​Awareness of spectators
2. Consistency of experience
3. Leaderboards
4. World info (viewers know the state of the game at all times)
5. Developer and publisher commitment
6. Show official inside-the-game or behind-the-studio videos

• ​​People need live real-time connections to their games. Riot built their business model around this and is incredibly successful.
• Stream 101 - relax, production values are not important, stream often, have a voice, showcase your people and their personalities
• Conclusion - game discovery is now video-based instead of text-based, the streaming community is growing fast, make the game "watchable", both fans and companies should stream

GDC2013 - WiiU Application Development with HTML5 and Javascript

• Nintendo announces the Nintendo Web Framework (NWF), a framework that allows you to create applications for the WiiU with HTML5 and Javascript.
• The WiiU offers dual screens (your tv and the gamepad), an internet browser, touchscreen, gyroscope, accelerometer, and support for Wii remote controllers.
• WiiU also launched with web service apps such as Hulu Plus, Amazon, and Youtube.
• Wii Street U is a new app by Google created using the NWF.
• The NWF offers a great way to prototype traditional native games.
• "Gunman Clive" is a 2D platformer game that was released on 3DS and in one month, outsold both its iOS and Android versions. There is marketing value in Nintendo hardware and people demand better controls that the WiiU can offer.
• NWF runs on a Windows PC and is based on the Webkit framework. With Javascript extensions, it allows use of the touchscreen, gyroscope, accelerometer, and any of the WiiU-supported controls. It also supports save data, file I/O, software keyboards, video playback, and access to the Miiverse.
• You can use standard HTML5 libraries like jQuery in your applications. The NWF Dashboard interfaces between your code and the WiiU hardwre. It will convert your gamepad touch inputs to mouse clicks. The Dashboard also comes with a web debugger/inspector.
• NWF uses a fast Javascript virtual machine, GPA accelerated graphics, and a great bitmap/sprite renderer. The hardware can run GUI Mark 3 (a benchmarking program) at 60 FPS even when you increase the number of sprites drawn by 10.
• The logo of NWF contains an image of a bamboo because the codename of the project was Bamboo. A bamboo's roots sprout from the ground very quickly, but it has a solid framework to support its fast growth. Likewise, NWF is a solid framework that supports quick development growth.
• NWF is free to use after getting a WiiU devkit and they have a special introductory program for new developers.
• Their business policy
• No concept approval
• Price and release date are independently set by developers
• Distribution will be following industry standard models
• ​In the future, NWF will also support Unity. Unity for WiiU will be distributed for free to all WiiU developers.

Practice 2012: Designing for Thousands of Autonomous Agents

Stone Librande, the lead designer on the new SimCity, gave a lecture about the autonomous agent system that the game is based on.

Presentation

• SimCity has been in development for three years. Unlike its predecessors, it has added a multiplayer component, both cooperative and competitive, and an agent-based system.
• The first SimCity has a 2 MB filesize. In comparison, Stone's PowerPoint presentation was already 10 MB. The early SimCity games only had graphical indications of traffic, but no actual cars that drove on the road.
• An agent is a carrier of information, bringing data from a source to a sink. Some examples of agents in SimCity include people, electricity, water, education influence, and fire and crime alert systems.
• Resources in the game include citizens, happiness, money, goods, sickness, taxes, water, and electricity. The agents that carry these resources are people, cars, trains, buses, and garbage trucks. The paths the agents use are streets, power lines, water pipes, and railroads. The units where the resources are spent at include houses, shops, and workplaces.
• Previous iterations of SimCity had a cell-based system. A police station, for example, had an area of effect so it could fight crime at any area in its vicinity. In an agent-based system, however, there must be a path between the house and the police station in order for it to work. If there's no path, the house can get robbed and the police station would ignore the crime, even if the house was right next to the station.
• The benefits of an agent-based system.

1. It's more realistic. The sims (citizens) need to work to get money, shops and factories need workers to operate, and there are real actual traffic jams.
2. The gameplay is deeper. Streets and paths are as important as buildings. The game feels like a puzzle in motion and not just an Excel sheet.
3. The game is more engaging. Every sim has a name and motivation, and the players will care about them. The city has a mesmerizing daily rhythm and there's a fluid liquid-like experience. There are actual rush hours twice a day, when people all scurry to work and come home from work.

• The problems of an agent-based system.

1. Agents are slow. They can't get answers immediately and sometimes they won't always arrive at the destination. The economy is driven by many game loops and it's difficult to design.
2. Agents are dumb. Designers constantly have to keep an eye on performance and programmers ruin the fun of the designers. The agents will always get absorbed by the first available sink. If they're looking for a job, they will stop at the first open position they can find, even if it's not optimal to the player. The player might want them to go work at the power plant because he needs power, but the agent would get a job at the 7-11 only because it was the first sink.
3. Agents are deliberately dumb. The team made an early game design decision to not let players tell the sims what to do. If the agents were too smart and made intelligent decisions by themselves, it would be very hard for the players to understand why.
4. Agents create design issues. Statistical analysis of agent behavior is difficult to do and it's hard to predict what will happen even for the designer. There are lots of bugs and it's tricky to troubleshoot problems because of the large agent network. The developers end up not trusting the agents.

• In the early design phase, the designers used lots of Excel and had to figure out correct sizes of all the units. Stone made giant one-page diagrams of all the game flows including residential flow, commercial, and industry.
• In the residential flow, there's a 3x3 grid of possible city blocks, with one axis being wealth and the other being density. Stone made sure that the densest and wealthiest block was not the best one, because players would get to that and feel like they've "beaten" then game. There are cons to becoming too wealthy or too dense. Wealthier people waste more electricity and power for the amount of land that they take. Stone wanted there to be no right answer to play the game.
• The game has a happiness system. Sims will be happy if they shop or go to parks, but sad if there's pollution, illnesses, or traffic. Unwealthy people who have no happiness will become homeless. The player will have to reduce trash from the city to get the homeless people to leave.
• In the industry flow, sims will have to work to get one money token, in which they can spend at a shop. Wealthy people would always shop at expensive stores, and unwealthy people shop at cheap ones.
• How do you work with tens of thousands of agents? Stone created an agent flowchart that defined agent behavior. He realized that if the flowchart was too big, it made the agents too complicated, so he deliberately dumbed down a lot of the AI and split up roles. The sims, for example, used to work until they get money and then shop until they're out of money. This was a complicated flowchart and also created a weird situation where everyone worked one day and then shopped the next day, but not do both on the same day. So he split up the sims into a worker type and a shopper type with one-track minds, and it made the day flow more realistically.
• Tourists can also come to the city by train, boat, or plane and spend their money. A household can also have children who will wander the streets until they find a school. If there are no schools, the children end up being criminals.
• Stone makes a lot of one-page infographics instead of wireframes and documents. This is more engaging for the team to see.
• The game has about 25 high-end systems and thousands of agents following their own agendas.
• SimCity is definitely more entertainment than it is a simulation. The developers are not aiming for realism; the game is ultimately a puzzle game.

Question and Answer

• Stone waits until the last possible moment to balance numbers. He generally keeps the numbers simple and flat so it's easier to think about them. For example, workers always get one money token from working and always spend one money token when shopping. If they decide that expensive shops would require two money tokens, this is a change they make near the end of development. These are also things they plan to retune constantly.
• The past designers of SimCity always wanted to make an agent-based game, but the technology was not ready for it before.
• Stone hopes that SimCity and The Sims never merge together into one game.
• The employee test involves building something on-site using the Glassbox engine in 3-4 hours. Their first task after they're hired is to spend a week building a prototype of their own design using the engine.
• The game uses tiltshift photography and makes the city look like a small toy set.
• The game needs a lot of tutorials and thought balloons from individual agents to teach mechanics. They wanted the teaching to be more organic and approachable. For example, in previous games, you needed to build the entire electricity and water system before sims would even move into your city. This was not particularly engaging to players who expect to jump right into the game and build houses. In the latest game, players can build houses and have sims move in, and then the sims would complain about not having water and electricity. The game plays towards player expectation and teaches through the agents about what's needed.
• There are three designers on the team (Stone himself, a multiplayer designer, and a city simulation designer) and about 10 to 12 scripters who script the flowcharts. The scripters are also considered to be designers but more on the technical side.

NYU 9th Floor Talks: The Cutting Edge of Game Research

Ken Perlin, a Computer Science professor at NYU, presented some of his cutting edge research in procedural animation and education games.

Presentation

• Ken is the founding director of NYU's Media Research Lab and the Director of the Games for Learning Institute. He is a mathematician who has won an Academy Award for his noise and procedural texturing techniques that have been used in film and television.
• Ken started his career in computer graphics. Being in the industry for so long, he has experienced the power of Moore's law, seeing computers get twice as faster every two years.
• He has developed several hundred Java applets. Some of his work can be found on his NYU homepage (http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/).
• When researching something, you have to boil it down to the simple possible version.
• One of Ken's biggest research interests has been conveying emotions through artificial characters.
• In Polly's World (http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/polly/track.html), Ken tries to convey emotions with the least possible number of vertices and polygons. The procedurally animated character is made up of only 6 vertices, but displays a wide range of emotions through its movements. Our brain maps simple animations to emotions.
• Why do we care about animated characters? Ken researches the human body as an instrument to understand psychological emotions.
• In Responsive Face (http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/facedemo/), Ken researches what's the simplest emotive face possible. At the very least, an emotive face requires movements of the eyebrows, lid, gaze, head, and mouth. A person has n-points in the face like a keyboard has a number of notes and facial expressions are like chords.
• Micro noise movements and procedural variations makes the emotions more realistic. Without these micro movements, the face is just a lifeless still picture.
• Autistic children have trouble looking at other human's faces and thus grow up not knowing how to read emotions. However, they don't have that problem with artificial, computer-generated faces. Many autistic children used Responsive Face to learn human emotions.
• Plan 9 From Outer Space, often regarded as the worst movie ever made, is almost unwatchable because the acting is so bad. The actors' faces are so emotionless that it's impossible to identify with the characters.
• In an attempt to create an "interactive Pride and Prejudice," Ken developed an applet with five birds with disembodied feet. The birds showcase procedural walking animation, which is tons better than canned animations.
• We should think of avatars the same way a director thinks about actors in a live play. We shouldn't communicate actions to the avatar (ie. "jump here", "punch that", "open this door"), but communicate emotions (ie. "you love her"). Likewise, actors shouldn't indicate (ie. "I am feeling happy!", "I feel very sad."), but actually emote.
• With Fish Tales (http://cims.nyu.edu/~perlin/fishtales2/), players can record a one-minute story using Bob the fish and two bouncing balls.
• In Candy Circle (http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/candycircle/), players make procedural music using a spinning wheel filled with candy. It researches the rule of the fifths; when the further away the chords are, the more dissonant the sounds are.
• Ken also experimented with spiral escalators (http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/escalator/). Spiral staircases always go right going upwards because they were designed solely for battle. Since most knights were right-handed, it would give the advantage to the person who's above.
• The barrier of entry to making games is so high. Ken would like to have more people coming into the arts that are enabled by programming.
• There are "fake languages" such as Code Do It and Scratch that enable people to jump into programming. Ken is researching how to make programming more integral to education.
• Ken's New Line Fractals (http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/newlinefractal/) show mathematical visual examples of fractals. Students can move vertices around to experiment with creating their own fractals.
• Using a real-time interpretive version of Java, Ken created Flower, in which students can directly edit the code and immediately affect the flower. In Musical Rubber Ducky, students can affect the ducky but also the music too using live code. Can we invite them to the narrative as well?
• Ken developed a Pride and Prejudice reader. Before the invention of books, literature used to be written on scrolls. Someone later introduced the concept of pages, a fixed length record that changes per edition. But writers wrote and thought in terms of sentences and paragraphs, not in pages.
• In this interactive map of Pride and Prejudice, you can see the entire book's topology. You can easily identify the key chapters of the book using filters and highlights.
• Asteroid is a game that topologically and mathematically exists on a torus or a doughnut.
• The second book to use the interactive map is Winnie the Pooh. This version also includes a procedurally animated bear that users can play around with using live coding. The code editor includes tools that enable learning programming easier. When you insert a 2D array, a map will appear that lets you set dots and automatically generate the points in the array for you.
• Everyone should be able to program. It should be as accessible as painting, filming, and writing. People need immediate feedback to instigate learning.
• Ken is really interested in how to power up this maker culture.

Question and Answer

• Learning tools should be like Google Docs in that they are collaborative, shared documents. People should have conversations with each other about creation. Learning is a performative activity.
• Just like how jazz is to music composition and improvisation is to acting, we need live perfomative structures for coding to learn programming.
• What's the difference between games and simulation? Games have goals.
• We need to increase programming literacy and convey programming as a liberal art. Kids need to look at code in their early stages.
• Ken remembers reading a children's book when he was a child and at the end were the advanced notes for the teacher to read. Although Ken couldn't read the notes as a child, he understood that that's what he was learning and that he'll eventually be able to read the advanced text. Kids shouldn't be using a fake language, but rather be looking at what the grown ups are using. They should be exposed to C++ or Java-like languages.
• Kids are learning reading through other subjects such a history and science. We should teach coding gradually in the same way.
• Many people are reluctant to learn coding, but that's okay. We should focus on teaching the kids. We don't currently live in a society that requires that level of technical knowledge, but this might change ten years in the future.
• Excel is a programming environment that many people use, despite not being programmers. Max/MSP is a programming language that non-programmers such as visual and sound artists use. Both of these programs are always running live and give immediate feedback. There's no intermediate building or compiling stage.
• People don't necessarily need to learn C++ or Java the same way that not all writers have to linguists. Guitarists don't need to learn how to make guitars.
• Programmers have a sense of being macho. Music, on the other hand, is more inclusive. We need a real-time sharing structure and a more inclusive environment for non-programmers.
• Will books become non-linear in the future? This may very well happen, but it won't replace the books as we know them. Different media can coexist the same way that different instruments can coexist. It's not all about hacking and recombinations. Technology is the wrong word to describe media; these are instruments.
• Will the secondary functions of the interactive reader overshadow the literary work itself? The work lives on if they're great. Beethoven lived on when the Beatles came around and the Beatles didn't go away when Lady Gaga came around.

Indie Tech Talk 02: Kaho Abe

Kaho Abe is a game designer who builds very physical games along with the hardware associated with them. She spoke at the Game Innovation Lab at Polytechnic University about her games and her inspirations.

Presentation

• Hit Me! is a two-player, physical game that encourages face-to-face real-world interactions, by both the players and the spectators. Two players wear hard hats with huge buttons on top. The object of the game is to hit the opponent's button on top of their head, which would cause the hitter's camera to take a snapshot of the victim that is then projected on a wall. The hitter receives a point and the judges can award additional points based on the quality of the snapshot.
• The big inspirations for Hit Me! are Twister and Van Damme's Lionheart. Kaho wanted to make a game that people can watch. She looked to Ridley Scott's Gladiator and sumo wrestling to help her design the game's rules. Players of the game had to sign a personal injury waiver form in order to play. The form psychologically got people to be really intensely physical.
• Mary Mack 5000 is a competitive twist on the children's hand-clapping game Patty Cake. Two players wear gloves with sensors in them and clap hands along with the rock music playing in the background. Each glove is assigned a voltage ID and the Arduino microcontroller knows exactly which glove is in contact with which. The message is sent to the Flash software that compares it to a XML sheet with timestamps and the correct clapping combinations. The game also comes with a rocker vest that give players the feeling of being a rock star playing a silly children's game.
• Kaho wanted to reintroduce a children's game as a rocker's game. Her major inspirations were Patty Cake for mechanics and Guitar Hero for the theme and aesthetics.
• Ninja Shadow Warrior is a photo-booth game using the Kinect camera built into an arcade cabinet. Players are tasked with filling up a silhouette of an object using their bodies. The game promotes face-to-face cooperative interaction as multiple players can work together to fill the silhouette. A snapshot of the players are taken at the end of each round and automatically uploaded to http://ninjashadowwarrior.tumblr.com/.
• Kaho first worked with webcams and green screens, but was unable to get the accuracy she wanted. She finally went with the Kinect and used Daniel Shiffman's Kinect library. With the Kinect, she extracted the silhouette of the players and it put it against the selected object using  a simple pixel-matching algorithm. She also built an elaborate arcade cabinet with giant ninja stars sticking out from its side and pictures of cartoon ninja bunnies to promote playfulness.
• The major inspirations for Ninja Shadow Warrior were arcades, photo sticker booths, and Twister. The game experiences a lot of emergent play behaviors from its players (ie. a father would carry his daughter on his shoulder to recreate the image).

Conversation with Andy Nealen

• Kaho has worked on all these projects in her presentation in the last two years. She started with binary buttons built by herself (Hit Me!) and moved onto using someone else's technology (Ninja Shadow Warrior's Kinect). She actually started working on Ninja Shadow Warrior before the Kinect was released, but later reappropriated it for the Kinect.
• She has no engineering background so she's personally constrained by her knowledge. Andy argues that these limitations help her design since she often designs very easy interfaces that are good for galleries where most attendees have never played a game before.
• Does she think about technology or game design first? She usually comes up with the concept first, then finds the technology to fit the concept.
• She loves Fry's Electronic stores and often finds good objects to work with. Fry's has tables and exteriors made out of things you'd find at a theme park.
• Kaho has a background in fashion design, which led her to create Mary Mack 5000. She finds fashion and tech to be very related since they both have functional and trendy aspects.
• Doug Wilson's Monkey See, Monkey Mime is a mimicking game that makes people wear silly things. Kaho's games are similar as evident in Hit Me's helmet, which resembles something from Ape Escape. The intention is to make people feel more comical and ridiculous. The hard hats tends to makes people feel more crazy and physical rather than feel safe. One time, a player grabbed a folding chair while playing Hit Me!.
• All her games are multiplayer and she tries to push a specific social dynamic with her games. During prototyping, playtesters would help her guide the design of the game, but she needs to balance that with pushing her original social intent.
• She loves Johann Sebastion Joust. That game and Hit Me! were both presented at the Plaython event in Athens and she would often go play Joust between sessions of her own game. She finds that there's a natural progression of bringing games back into the physical space.
• Public space games should be easy to use and understand. Using low tech and being accessible is synergistic. Most game designers design something very complex and spend iterations subtracting from it to make it accessible, but Kaho spends less time iterating since she designs very accessible games from the start.
• Her advice to game designers: think about physical interactions from shaking hands to hugging. Think about what make children games fun like Tag and Capture the Flag.

Question and Answer

• How does Kaho distribute her games? She documents her game-making process and posts code online. She also provides release kits so other developers can jump right into it. She hopes others take her work and make more of them.
• Her hardware components are not just a piece of software for people to download. As an artist and academic, her goals are not the same as a professional developer so she doesn't need to make distributable hardware. Her intention was always to make games people can play face-to-face. She wants people to meet up at specific locations and play.
• She explores the performative aspects of games and designs for the spectators as much as for the players. It makes the game more exciting to have an audience watching. With performative props and costumes, her work is more performance art than commercial products.
• Her games have a high barrier to get and setup. Ninja Shadow Warrior, on the other hand, is very accessible and distributable since it uses the Kinect technology. But Kaho hated the Kinect because she's used to making her own devices. She actually thinks the Kinect is less accessible since it's $150, which is a lot compared to the cheapest webcam you can find.
• It's not creatively or financially important to her to reach as many players as possible. She assumes people like to make and wire things up like she does, and hopes they will do so to play her games.
• Her inspirations come from pop culture, movies, and scenarios in stories. She actually derives very little inspirations from games. She's neither a part of or completely distanced from the game community; she's somewhere in between.
• Hit Me! and Mary Mack 5000 included fashion components. Kaho comes from a fashion background and her graduate thesis was about wearable technology. She finds it funny that there's a barrier between people and their clothing and that they are often more intimate with technology.
• What are fashion people's response to her work? They find it fun and interesting.
• Kaho worked a corporate design job that she hated. September 11 made her decide to go to graduate school and there, she realized she liked game design and logic. Logic turned on a part of her brain that she has previously turned off to focus on art and design.
• Her games are designed to create interaction. She constantly reverse engineers things and finds fun in the success of figuring out new technology.

Prince Building Tech Talk

The building located on Prince Street in Soho, New York is home of some amazing tech companies including 10Gen, ZocDoc, Thrillist, and foursquare. In their first meetup, these four companies each gave overviews of their technologies and also tours of their offices.

10gen

• Eric Milke, core server tech lead engineer of 10gen, represented the company at the talk. He graduated from Cornell University and specializes in C++.
• 10gen, developer of MongoDB, was founded in 2007 by Eliot Horowitz and Dwight Merriman. The company now has over 100 employees and four offices.
• MongoDB is a scalable, high performance, open source, NoSQL database. It provides document-oriented storage, dynamic schema, full index support, replication, high availability, auto-sharding, and fast in-place updates.
• MongoDB's document storage of JSON docs allows for the three main pillars of the company -- availability, scalability, and simplicity.
• To advocate availability, MongoDB provides easy replication and automated fail-over. Servers are constantly transmitting data between each other. For scalability, there are scale reads and built-in sharding. The system auto-rebalances shards if they grow disproportionally. And for simplicity, the database has simple configurations with few startup parameters, a flexible document model that doesn't force unnecessary normalization, and natural-looking language binding.
• The server is written in C++ and has extensive use of memory mapped files. 10gen supports drivers for C, C#, C++, Erlang, Haskell, Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Scala, but there are many unofficial third-party drivers for other languages.
• Their future plans include implementing concurrency (yielding and database-level locking), a new aggregation framework, TTL collections, hash shard keys, and improving free list implementation to avoid fragmentation.
• The perfect job combines the stuff you love to do, the stuff you're good at, and the stuff you get paid to do.

foursquare

• Harry Heymann presented foursquare's stack, team structure, vision, and a couple examples of tough technical problems they're trying to solve.
• foursquare is a "better Yelp than Yelp." It is individualized to the user. If the user likes expensive restaurants, it would recommend higher end places to eat.
• foursquare currently has logged 2 billion checkins, 20+ million users, and 30+ million places. The company is only three years old but it has 110 employees, 50 of which are server engineers, 12 client developers, 5 product managers, and 6 designers. The company frequently holds hack days.
• foursquare uses MongoDB for its database.
• Local ads are the biggest ad market.
• Their company culture is to hire the best and give them authority to build what they want with little overhead. Developers form teams of two or three people and they conceive and launch features on their own schedule.
• In the last year, the company has streamlined the signup process, revamped venue searches, added user and merchant newsletters, added networked list and web explore, deeply integrated Facebook, and implemented user tools, menus, and fast checkin flows.
• Future plans include auto-identifying local experts and surfacing their knowledge to other users (ie. getting sushi experts to give tips about the best local sushi places), letting users following merchant news, scaling upwards to 20 billion checkins, recommending based on GPS, aggregating a huge number of tips, and visualizing a user's history into a beautiful infographic-like diary. And there are always algorithmic improvements to the software.
• Tools that they use include the Scala programming language, Hadoop, Hive for data analysis, EC2 hardware, and MongoDB.
• They stopped using Google Maps because it was too expensive and went with OpenStreetMap, a user-driven map system. Comparatively, Wikipedia would bypass Encyclopedia Britanica in five years and they see the potential of the crowd-sourced, open-data map to do the same.
• They plan to add functionality that promotes super users to have editing permissions to the database.
• They have one of the nicest offices. The main working area promotes a flat structure. There are no cubicles or offices; all the desks sit together without any divisions between coworkers. There are multiple cameras to the other office in California, all overseeing the entire space. The cameras are on 24/7 and it makes it feel like an extension of the NY office, rather than a completely remote location. When they have inter-office stand-ups, all the team members actually stand up next to the big monitors that are connected to the other office. Whenever they want to speak to a person at the other office, rather than sending an instant message on the computer, they go to the stand up station, unmute the microphone, and ask for the other person.
• There is an abundance of conference rooms, each named and themed after a foursquare badge. The Herbivore room is filled with plants and rustic furniture, the Socialite room had modern furniture and a nightclub feel, and the Far Far Away room had a wallpaper of a skycam of New York City.
• In the middle of the office was the Atrium with a ceiling window so employees can get some sun and a small theater space for members to do in-house classes and experimentation. The kitchen was filled with picnic tables and snacks, and had a small stage in the middle for talks. There were also multiple phone booths spread around the office for people to make private phone calls.

Thrillist

• Mark O'Neill, CTO of Thrillist, ran through the history of the company and the technologies they employ.
• Thrilist is a website about men's lifestyle and does data recommendations. It has two sister sites -- JackThreads, a members-only online-shopping community for men, and Thrillist Rewards, which runs curated events for its target demographic of young males.
• Thrillist's stack involves LAMP, MongoDB, and Solr, along with some Ruby and Python. The JackThreads stack includes Drupal and MySQL, and Thrillist Rewards uses Cake.
• The three pillars of the stack are content, users, and commerce. After Thrillist merged with JackThreads and launched rewards, they began moving to a ervice-oriented architecture.
• In their new architecture, they have four main services named JITR, Zuul, Artemis, and Content.
• Future plans include API acceleration, personalization, recommendations, and analysis of user behaviors.

ZocDoc

• Nick Ganju, the CTO of ZocDoc, talked about ZocDoc's technology and building the engineering team.
• ZocDoc is a website to find local doctors and book appointments online. The average wait time for a doctor is 21 days, but ZocDoc appointments are made within 48 hours.
• The company only has 35 engineers but plans to double by year end. They run Hackathons in the Hamptons and have a super selective hiring process.
• ZocDoc is focused on scaling, both in the sense of user traffic and in the sense of developers and code base. Currently, they have millions of lines of code written.
• Tools that they use include Tortoise, Kiln, and Mercurial. Nick stresses that developers need to move to distributed version control as soon as they start scaling. They also use TeamCity and Jenkins.
• All of their other tools are Microsoft based, including C#, Visual Studio, IIS7, and SQL Server 2008. They use C# because it is important to use a static typed language when you scale up. C# provides many of the modern programming features such as lambdas, tuples, async, parallel, and dynamic binding.
• They build features per branch and have automated rule-based code reviews that detect production commits and analyze static code. The code reviews outlaw certain classes like SqlCommand. A Selenium bot runs unit tests every 15 minutes and has the functionality to rollback the code if a committed feature ends up breaking.
• They constantly run A/B tests for every possible feature and also implement feature flags, a development feature inspired by Etsy. With feature flags, they put lots of Booleans in the code to easily turn on and off features.
• Developers should not over engineer at a startup. The priority is to develop the product and release it, then go back and refactor when you have the resources. Over engineering your caching system, for example, will delay your product development.
• ZocDoc traces everything that happens on a page, but the logs can only be read by trusted IPs. This helps them track down bugs that randomly happen every once in a while, otherwise called Heisenbugs.
• They developed ZocMon, a monitoring tool like Google Analytics that soon will be open-source.
• They make daily deploys. They code freeze at 9pm, whereby the testers in India spend the rest of the time testing.

Indie Tech Talk 01: Scott Anderson

In the first of ten Indie tech talks, Scott Anderson, creator of Shadow Physics, spoke about using technology for gameplay innovations, specifically signed distance fields.

Presentation

• Scott has three main inspirations for his game design: the Demo Scene community, the Creative Coding community, and molecular gastronomy.
• He introduced two technologies: GPU particle systems and signed distance fields, and showed two videos - Agenda Circling Forth by CNCD Fairlight (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma8KXOGS8UU), which utilizes GPU particle systems, and Zeo-x-s by Quite (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqrRKp6NiR8), which procedurally generates fractal worlds using signed distance fields.
• Distance fields are basically the closest distance to a given surface. They are useful for font rendering and can be signed or unsigned, 2D or 3D.
• Signed distance fields can be created explicitly by generating from a bitmap/mesh and storing in an image or 3D model. They can also be created implicitly using math to calculate the distance from points. This is easy to compose and can be animated or transformed in real-time.
• For 2D signed distance fields, fill pixels if the distance is less than zero and modify with different effects such as a drop shadow filter. 3D is trickier. Normal raycasting to calculate distances can be expensive so you should use sphere tracing.
• You can get normals by calculating the gradient at intersection points.
• For shadows, trace another ray from the intersection to the light position.
• For collision, use simple sphere collision. This, however, can be expensive and it makes the scene size and details of the scene limited.
• Check Matt Swoboda's blog (http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/) for more information regarding signed distance fields.

Conversation with Andy Nealen

• How is signed distance fields useful for gameplay? In games, we represent worlds as either pixels or models. It's interesting to look at signed distance fields as an addition way to represent worlds. There are no games that uses it in 3D, but Pixel Junk Shooter uses signed distance fields in 2D.
• Thinking of moving vertices in different ways can lead to interesting game designs. Scott, himself, has an idea for a fighting game featuring particle characters.
• The technical excellence award at IGF should be given for the creative use of technology, not for the technical difficulty of the implementation. It is irrelevant on how hard the feature is to implement, but its usage is the distinguishing factor. A lot of the time, the simplest engineering solution is the best solution. Programming and engineering has a lot to do with getting around hardware constraints. The demos Scott showed were hard to do, but it's only as hard as they need to be.
• The Indie scene in the 90s built things close to triple-A games, but by a super small team and that's what made them amazing. Gish, however, was the turning point in the indie scene where the focus shifted to interesting aesthetics instead of close to triple-A visuals.
• Scott is a traditional programmer who makes tools. It's interesting to think of code as the tool we use, not the tool that makes the tool we use.
• Scott spent two years making Shadow Physics, but it's currently put on indefinite hiatus. Shadow Physics is an amazing use of technology, but it didn't come together in the end. It did, however, inspire a bunch of clones such as Lost in Shadow and Contrast.

Audience Question and Answer

• Would Scott consider using Kickstarter to fund other games like Shadow Physics? Before Double Fine, there was no way for Kickstarter to raise more than $5,000. After that revolution, he would consider using Kickstarter, but it is hard for him to work on a game with other jobs taking up time.
• How much of the art credit belongs to the programmers? For example, the beautiful look of Journey has a lot to do with the shaders done by the engineers. Usually, there is a person assigned as the technical artist or the "feel engineer" in Journey's case, who moves in between art and programming.
• The job of a triple-A programmer is to make designer's dreams come true, but indie programmers work on their own ideas. Because of this, they make designs out of cool technology.
• Minecraft took boxes to an interesting design and mechanic, and then Terraria flipped it to another perspective. Triple-A games don't have this kind of dialogue. Triple-A games have too much risk mitigation. They also hire many artists to explicitly make art, so there's no need for procedural generation.
• Web development has a lot of interesting technical stuff, but there's not so much of that in games.
• Any recommendations for programmers trying to learn art? Artists learning programming is easier than programmers learning art. Ideally, everyone should learn both so that you use both sides of your brain. You need to practice and immerse yourself in the arts. You can get to decent levels fast, but you need dedication to get to an advanced level. You should sketch and draw everyday.
• Don't use design documents. For Scott, it is hard to put the feelings of the visuals into words.

Doing Ridiculous Shit With Technology

Douglas Wilson, a PhD student at IT University of Copenhagen's Center for Computer Games Research, gave a talk about his work, his inspiration from folk games, and his creative uses of technology. During the roundtable discussion, the attendees debated on topics of rhetoric vs. design and creating art vs. making money.

Presentation

• Douglas's mission statement: Games that are confrontational, silly, broken, or incomplete can shift the focus of games from winning to a more festive, co-dependent, and performative play.
• His sources of philosophical inspiration include Hannah Arendt, Dave Hickey, Bill Gaver, Grant Kester, Chantal Mouffe, Bernie DeKoven, Paul Dourish, and Richard Schechner.
• The games he created include Dark Room Sex Games, B.U.T.T.O.N., Johann Sebastian Joust, and the in-progress Mutazione.
• During a summer when the Playstation Move controller was on his mind, he created Dog the Wag. In this game, players tie a Move controller to their butts and get on all fours. The more they shake their butts and effectively "wag their tails," the more points they get. Sometimes, a player's controller will flash, making him vulnerable and causing the other players to tackle him to eliminate him from the game.
• Folk games are physical party games, many of unknown origin. An example of a folk game is one where players tie a string to their butt and tie a rock to the other end of the string. They run through an obstacle course while trying to knock objects with the rock.
• His first attempt at a motion game was inspired by Street Fighter. He created a 2-player fighting game where the fighters would perform fantastic moves based on the players' movements. However, this game didn't work out and ultimately failed. He realized that using traditional games as a precedence for motion games was leading him down the wrong path, so he turned to folk games for inspiration.
• Folk games are defined as traditional, ethnic, or indigenous sports or games. Folk games often are simple in design, use common equipment, spread by word of mouth, are open to house rules, physical, and deliberately silly. Folk games are an attitude. They are egalitarian.
• Ninja is a theatrical, turn-based folk game where people perform ninja poses and try to slap each other's hands.
• There is a distinction between modern sports and popular sports. A modern sport is a ritual of perfect achievement where athletes set records (ie. Olympics, NBA, NFL, etc.). A popular sport, however, is festive and not serious. Anyone can get involved and there is a joy of subversion.
• For example, in Dog the Wag, tying a controller to your butt exhibits the joy of subversion. No matter what the game is, you are already having fun.
• Beacons of Hope is an installation game designed by Douglas. It is played with 20 people in a completely dark room. Two of the players are monsters who must try to catch all the human players and eliminate them from the game. The human players have to find three Move controllers in the dark (representing beacons) and simultaneously turn on all three beacons at the same time to win the game. This game is a direct ripoff of an old camp game.
• MegaGIRP is another installation game designed by Douglas, based on an existing web game called GIRP. MegaGIRP uses four Dance Dance Revolution pads instead of a keyboard, so instead of being a "Twister for your fingers," it becomes actual Twister. The game isn't so much like mountain climbing, but it's definitely a taxing and annoying physical exercise that's ultimately fun. The obvious inspiration for this game was Twister.
• Johann Sebastian Joust was inspired by two separate folk games. The first was the game of chicken played on a tight rope. Two players start on opposite sides of a tight rope and their objective is to get to the other side while pushing the other player off the tight rope. The second point of inspiration was a folk game where two blindfolded players carry a small fruit with spoons. The first person to hit the other wins or whoever drops the fruit first loses. This gave him the idea that a slow motion physical game is incredibly fun. Lemon Jousting, a very similar game to the second folk game, was unbeknownst to Douglas when he worked on Johann Sebastian Joust.
• Monkey See, Monkey Mime was a game about mimicking.
• Edgar Rice Frotteur was a game jam project where he hung 20 Move controllers on the ceiling and created a jungle gym game.
• In the marketing for the Move controller, the slogan was "This changes everything." There is an iconic image of Kevin Butler holding two Move controllers and projecting a bow and arrow. Sony wants to get across the idea that you can do anything with the Move, but this is not true in reality. Douglas thinks it's better to embrace technological limitations than to fight it.
• As an indie developer, your best option is to embrace your constraints. For example, accelerometers are terrible and instead of making a game heavily based on the nuances of movement, he designed games that are essentially binary. You are either moving it or not.
• In the same note, he realized that he doesn't have to let the technology enforce all the rules of the game. He "deputizes" the player, letting them enforce the rules themselves. In B.U.T.T.O.N., the game doesn't know if the players take ten steps back or spin around in a circle when told, but the players have to enforce these rules among themselves or else the game is not fun. Likewise, in Johann Sebastian Joust, the game doesn't know if they players are standing within the circle or not.
• There is an aesthetic beauty in imperfection. His games let players to act the fool, to have "half-baked fun." He considers motion control as slapstick comedy. Many of his games don't need a screen because it's fun to just watch the players.
• He considers Wario Ware: Smooth Moves by far the best game on the Wii. It is a game that embraces the limitations of the Wii remote and institutes a carnivalesque environment.
• Frobisher Says is a PS Vita game not yet released in the US. It uses all of the Vita's technology. It includes a minigame called Look Away where the player loses if the Vita's camera ever tracks the white of the player's eyes, so the player plays the game without ever even looking at the screen.
• Fingle for the iPad is like Twister for your fingers. It cased in 70/80s sexual innuendo and makes players feel uncomfortable as their fingers cross into awkward positions.
• How does technology improve games? Douglas thinks this is the wrong question to ask and almost offensive to think about. The real question he wants to answer is, How can games improve technology?

Question and Answer

• Ninja didn't inspire Johann Sebastian Joust. But both games provide good public spectacle and Ninja is a good reference point.
• What are the social settings for his games? People wouldn't play Dog the Wag unless they are crazy or completely drunk at a party. It would be interesting to play his games at a non-traditional setting for party games such as a cathedral. Game studies often ignore the social contexts of games. As a designer, it's useful to think of social environments pragmatically.
• He looks at the last 50 years of contemporary, theater, and performance art as inspiration for his games. He wants to move away from the "banking model of art" where artists deposit meaning into objects and audiences withdraw meaning from the objects.
• Dog the Wag can be a violent game. It is something you don't want to play with strangers. This doesn't mean that all physical games of this nature are dangerous, but they need moderation on their brutality.
• Family picnic games were created as ice breakers and a general way to prevent the family from fighting each other. But these games and camp games can be brutal and violent. Dodgeball is historically brutal. It is up to the players to set the tone of the game.
• Frank Lantz mentions there is tension between Douglas's aggression against winning/losing as stated in his mission statement and the fact that all of his works clearly involves winning/losing. Douglas claims that his games, in a way, are parodies of winning/losing. They are games where players need to modulate themselves. In B.U.T.T.O.N., for example, players can easily win if they never take any steps back, don't follow instructions, and act violently, but the game wouldn't be fun at all.
• Frank is annoyed by creators having contradictory rhetoric and work. This can be attributed to the fact that many creators often have to take exaggerated rhetorical stances to defend their art. "Everything is an overcorrection." Meanwhile, writers like strong quotes to provoke people.
• For Douglas, as a designer, it useful to have a strong rhetoric as a framework for design. But according to Eric Zimmerman, the danger of overcorrection is that you become less flexible as a designer.
• Brenda Brathwaite has stated "mechanic is the message" and "rules are everything." These have been responses to the over Hollywood-ification of the industry. Don't confuse cutscenes and narrative as the game itself. This is a very strong rhetorical stance that she has taken, though it may be the case that she doesn't think it's necessarily true. Frank criticizes Ian Bogost and Miguel Sicart for being guilty of this.
• Douglas thinks Proteus is the best game of the last decade.
• Douglas claims that "Braid is a shitty game because Jonathan Blow doesn't take writing seriously." Some of the NYU faculty thinks that Blow does take writing seriously; he's just a bad wrtier.
• How do you balance being a creator of art and a creator of commercial products? Definitely a challenge. There are many new venues celebrating indie and art games such as Babycastles, Wild  Rumpus in London, Kill Screen, No Quarter, and Gamma. There are also some organizations supporting the creation of art games like Eyebeam.
• Terry Cavanagh is a creator who made a lot of money from VVVVVV. Now he is working on ChatChat, a game about cats talking to other cats, even though this game would probably not make him any money. It's important for creative designers to be able to work on their passionate projects, but also something else to pay the bills.
• Another example is Zach Gage who makes commercial games like Spelltower, but also does a lot of weird art pieces.
• What about ludic forms in the art world? There are many great contemporary ludic art pieces such as Carsten Höller's Slide at the New Museum or Oliver Herring's TASK Parties. There is also the Fluxus art movement. Meanwhile, there are many games that are invading the art space such as the exhibitions at MOMA and the Smithsonian.
• Why does Douglas use commodity hardware like the PS Move controller and DDR pads? As an indie game developer, he needs peers to test his games and needs easy distribution. Having self-created tech is not reliable and there is no way to easily move his tech around. He always finds a nice aesthetic in the subversion of commodity hardware (ie. using these expensive, high-tech PS Move controllers and strapping it to people's behinds).
• Katherine Isbister mentions there is a weird feedback loop where engineers make things based on science fiction, which in turn is written by people who don't understand technology. 

Shaking Up Our Relations With Machines

Katherine Isbister, director of the Game Innovation Lab at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU, gave a talk about human computer interaction and leveraging game mechanics to engage people into moving their bodies.

Presentation

• When people engage with computers, they are often in a hunched position, looking at their screens. A colleague of Katherine's compared this to people being in the threat position.
• People like the iPhone and one reason is that they need to stroke the screen to unlock it. This motion is comparable to petting an animal. It is warming and inviting, not vindictive.
• Engineers often make very dry interfaces, but we need more kinetically engaging human computer interaction.
• G-mail Tai Chi was created as an April Fool's joke, perhaps as a parody of a talk given by Katherine herself at GDC. The joke is that users would have to perform tai chi in front of their webcam to check their e-mail. But for Katherine, why not? It is a healthier way to interact with your computer.
• Studies have shown that multi-touch authentication (ie. using all your fingers to unlock your tablet) is not only more kinesthetically pleasurable, but also more secure.
• Physical movement in HCI may be awkward and confusing to people, but in the game space, it's okay to move around. Katherine has been working on several games for learning that involve large kinetic movement.
• Scoop is played with the Kinect, where players extend their arms out and solve math problems by cutting fractions. Hormones shift as you move more, which increase math confidence.
• Moveit/Yamove is a 2 player game in which both players hold a phone. They are given the name of a move to do and both players not only have to come up with a way to physically represent the move, but also do it synchronously. This game will be featured at No Quarter. When Babycastles took hold of this game, they turned it into a dance off game.
• Katherine is also working on a surveillance camera game based on the idea that public surveillance will soon become public utility. The game is played in the space outside of the Game Innovation Lab at Polytechnic University. Players gather as many people to crowd in the camera's vision space, which in turn controls characters in the game. The game itself is projected on a giant wall installation.

Question and Answer

• Schools tend to inhibit movement. They teach kids the value of sitting and focusing on one singular task at a time. But Katherine points out that bicycling has both properties of focus and movement.
• Katherine moved to academia because she couldn't stand the idea of sitting at a cubicle all day long. She needed the freedom to be able to move around throughout the day.
• Repeated HCI actions have transformed our bodies. An attendee recounts a girl he saw on the subway train, who spent the entire ride texting. He noticed that her extreme amount of texting throughout the years have transformed her thumbs into a weird unnatural position. Katherine mentions pictures of manual laborers of the 1930s who have grown unnatural muscles from their work at the assembly lines.
• She commends Wario Ware: Smooth Moves for a game that promotes large active movement. The game includes many fast-paced micro-games where the player is given a quick image of how to hold the controller and then is thrown straight into the game without any further instructions. Due to this nature, the player doesn't have much time to process a way to perform these moves in a not-so-embarrassing way.
• There are many interesting display devices in our future from touch screens to wall mounted displays to Google glasses. It often takes academia to take advantage of these technologies in interesting ways.
• What are other interesting postures besides the dominant and feeble? Synchronicity is a very powerful gesture.
• Will motion controlled games ever enter the realm of pro/competitive gaming or gold farming? Pretend swordfighting can be very taxing to the player; they can get easily exhausted after a few minutes of waving their arms wildly. It is difficult to have physical games be deep, long-session games.
• Games need to take advantage of the beauty of the human movement. When motion utilizes the movement qualities that are beautiful, a great spectacle can be provided by the game and the players themselves.
• Much of traditional game UI is antiquated. Joysticks derives its design from plane controls, as if a player of a game pilots the avatar. Radar display have a significant influence on game HUD.
• Is there a paradigm shift between casual and hardcore gaming? Physicality is often not the front-end for traditional games. Dance and exercise games have recently been big sellers. There is no reason why dance games can't be played by a controller, but it loses much of its power if it was designed for a traditional controller.
• Naomi Clark mentions a parody video of a Kinect version of Assassin's Creed, where the players do ridiculous movements to play as the highly-acrobatic assassin. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NufHsmITjM