While visiting Denmark, I had the pleasure of visiting the CODER lab at the University of Arhus. My Time with the project was brief, mostly talking about score boards and time trials, but we had some great discussions. I totally recommend checking out their vimeo page.
Game Description:
In Quantum moves, players try to move a probability distribution representing an atom to a goal location as quickly as possible. Players are judged based on speed and accuracy. The data collected from participants is mined by an algorithm, and the optimal path is used in the creation of actual quantum computers. Very cool!
I attempted to address positive ways to deal with depression and fear through gameplay. Mainly, focus on the good things and collect them (blue lights) and rely on the things that you love/make you feel safe to protect you from negative emotions. This game uses AR technologies. You must also download Reactivision found at http://reactivision.sourceforge.net/ (also included in the build) Place the glyph (included) on something that you love or makes you feel safe. You may hold it up to the camera at any time to protect you from enemies.
Today we made sure that everyone had python installed and went over some basics of the command line terminal. Essentially, we opened our terminal, typed “python” and messed around with the interpreter. We then created our first script, saved as “test.py” with the line:
print “hello world”
and successfully ran it on our terminal.
We then messed a bit with variables and a for loop.
The scripts we ran are attached. If you weren’t here, try and get them to run on your machine.
Game Description:
Alpha Racers is a fun and exciting new learning game that will help your child learn their letters and sounds! Unlike many alphabet games currently available, Alpha Racers is actually a real racing game, where your child learns their letters as they race for the trophy!
I’ve heard the saying that the only people that will read your thesis are your advisor and your mom. While I love my mom and really respect my advisor, this just doesn’t do it for me. I, like many academics, want my work to be read.
Whenever I get frustrated with something I try to do a bit of research on it to pinpoint why it’s bothering me. It also helps me think about how I can address my frustration so that I’m not just stewing. In my review, I saw a trend: academic writing seems to be inaccessible.
First, there’s the actual restriction on academic articles, paywalls. With a paywall, an academic journal can refuse to show you an article unless you have a subscription, or pay by the article. For example here’s an article about videogames and neuroscience that I wanted to read:
Only 51$ for 24 hours!
For a broke college student, this is a lot of money. Especially if you’re doing a lit review which would require several sources. All is not lost, though, because most universities give free access for their students. Unfortunately, not everyone is a student. Actually, only 39% of 18 to 24 year-olds are in college (and that’s across all disciplines). Point being, the majority of the population needs to pay a lot of money to stay up to date with research… and that’s not happening.
Even if you manage to get ahold of an academic article, there seems to be an art to deciphering them. A quick google search of academic writing, and bad academic writing, reveals tons of people complaining about the language and style used in academic articles.
It’s not that academics CAN’T write, but that most feel pressure to write in academise. I’m currently reading a book titled “Writing for the social sciences” and have found it immensely helpful (link at the bottom). The advice given in this book is to write plainly, and to make your writing accessible. The problem is it generally doesn’t sound smart, and, as shallow as this seems, people may not hold it in high regard.
Look at that! It sounds so smart! I think.
It’s no wonder that wikipedia is so popular. It addresses both of these issues. It’s accessible, and it’s readable (for the most part). Still worried about errors in an editable encyclopedia? you might want to take a look at this Nature article.
So, how can we address this issue? That’s a difficult question, I have some theories but they may only work for myself. While I was at Stanford I noticed that almost every assignment was accompanied with some sort of presentation or media. Most stanford classes urged their students to create some product that people could actually use when conducting research. I’ve gathered a few examples of what this means.
Have an elevator pitch.
You’ve probably heard of this concept, but if you haven’t you should be familiar with it. An elevator pitch is “is a short summary used to quickly and simply define a person, profession, product, service, organization or event and its value proposition.” In other words, pretend you’re in an elevator and have to describe your work before the person you’re talking to gets off. I know this is hard to do you’ve probably spent YEARS working on your project and summarizing this is intimidating. But, I have seen several researchers scare off potential audiences because they don’t have a concise answer to the question “What do you do?” Plus, you can use this pitch at family get togethers.
Don’t say, show.
Vsauce is making some of the coolest science videos on the internet right now. Take a moment to check out this video. Did you notice how many views that video has? At this moment… 1,776,571. The video cuts to the cool part of the study, gives a short synopsis, and provides a link to the actual paper. That’s freaking cool. It’s like a movie trailer for a research study. Now, I’m not saying you should have production values on par with this video, but, if you want viewers, it doesn’t hurt to polish it a bit.
Have some sort of presence on the internet.
Having an online presence helps to get your work out there and makes it more visible. Some of the coolest interactions that I’ve had come out of tweets and blog posts I’ve written. It does require some upkeep, but keep in mind you’re a few keystrokes from sharing your ideas with others.
If you want more people to read your work, I suggest you try out some of these methods and reflect on how you learn about new studies outside of journal articles.
Quick update today. I came across a cool tool recently. In an effort to graduate, I’ve been trying to write more. Thanks to research, I’ve also been interested in what text analysis tools can determine based on your input. That’s how I came across this. I write Like is a cool website that lets you upload a piece of writing and then performs some analysis to determine what famous author you write like. I apparently write like Agatha Christie. I would rather write like Douglas Adams, but this is cool too.
Some other cool writing sites I’ve come across are wordle and cohmetrix.
Like I write like wordle lets you upload a doc and then creates a word cloud based on word frequency. For example, here’s mine.
Cohmetrix is a little more academic. In their words “Coh-Metrix calculates the coherence of texts on a wide range of measures. It replaces common readability formulas by applying the latest in computational linguistics and linking this to the latest research in psycholinguistics.” In other words, it takes your writing and calculates cool stats like grade level.
This post was a long time coming. About a half a year ago, a group of us decided to create the worst game ever. It (the game) was terrible, so I guess we succeeded.
During the emerging scholars meeting, a couple of people talked about using some of the time to create a tangible product. The first idea was a game jam, but people didn’t seem particularly thrilled to try and create a game (from to start to finish) in about 2 hours. Making a good game from scratch in such a short amount of time was definitely a lofty goal, so instead we created the first Worst Game Ever Jam.
Knowing that we were making the worst game ever worked well for two reasons. First, because we weren’t worried about making a “good game” we were able to create something quickly without worrying about quality. Second, because it our goal was to make a terrible game, we had plenty of ideas.
Brainstorming:
We used the KJ technique to brainstorm what makes a terrible game. By the way, I highly recommend the KJ technique to anyone trying reach a consensus quickly. It’s worked very well in several occasions. Here are some topics that came up:
Themes
Liver! The game (my favorite)
LOL cats!
Exploring body functions
Water Treatment plant: an epic saga
Getting Tenure
Bodily functions: exploring the inner body
Watching paint dry.
Qualities
Micro transactions
Poorly translated
unwinnable (It’s a word)
Linear gameplay
Terrible voiceovers
Tutorials for everything
Too little instruction (Not knowing how to play, or what the controls are)
Moving makes your character die
Require math problems (have math problems give a wrong answer).
Spamming social networks (Tweets, friend requests)
Collects player data
The game makes you feel bad for failing
A lot of NPC conversations
Assigns a grade at the end
Everything is orange!
After wading through the suggestions, we decided to make an educational game using LOL cats, micro transactions, and incoherent instructions.
First Steps:
We decided to give our project a title. I forget what the original title was, but after we put it through Bable Fish a couple of times we ended up with “You can play a role in reshaping the beautiful”. Pure gibberish. It was perfect.
We then split up the work load in a way that everyone could contribute. We needed art, narrative, design, music, and coding. I can’t stress how much dropbox helped to coordinate this. Once everyone had a way to contribute, we set out to create an abomination.
The Aftermath:
After 2 hours of talking about what makes a terrible game, we ended up with this. Play it at your own risk. We’re currently trying to sell it to Zynga.
(The ‘kickin’ sound track, by Osvaldo Jimenez, is set to drop NEVER. Maybe we’ll put it up on soundcloud.)
Reflection:
As Jim Gee, a co-author of the game, pointed out, thinking about what makes a terrible game was actually a great way to avoid those pitfalls in the future. I think this is terribly important for game designers (and people who work with games, but havent tried to create one themselves). Bottom line, making a terrible game forces you to think about why a game is terrible and lets you work towards fixing those problems. It’s also a good way to get out those frustrations. I plan on doing another Worst Game Ever jam in the future.
Have an opinion about what makes a terrible game? Leave it in the comments.
I recently ran across a lifehacker article that detailed how to use your dropbox as a server for a small website. I thought it was awesome and fit well with a previous post, so I thought it was worth posting it here as reference. If anyone has tried this, leave a comment about your experience.
Recently, I went to New York and found myself at the Nintendo World Store. In short, it was awesome, but not necessarily because of the stuff that was being sold. Don’t get me wrong, they have lots of cool stuff that you can’t get anywhere else (I picked up some Mario Bros. Pixel Playing cards). The coolest thing about that place: The staff.
The Nintendo world staff was great! After talking to them for a bit you can tell they love games. In fact, they have a really cool display on the second floor made up of memorabilia donated by the staff. The display has stuff from Pokemon, Fire emblem, Earthbound and tons of other games. However, the highlight for me was being able to use a hylian shield! (It was heavy!) I wanted to buy it, but it cost 80 rupees.
