No post yesterday and on Friday? Wait, I can explain. I went to London to visit an Imogen Heap concert. And it wasn’t just any concert either. It took place in the Royal Albert Hall. Calling it spectacular would be an understatement.

Are you ready to electronic alternative indie ambient trip-hop classical synthpop rock? (Photo by Veronika Barth)

I first heard Imogen Heap back when she was still in Frou Frou. I noticed her first in a fan-made Anime video. Over the time, I stumbled across her songs quite frequently (Garden State, The O.C.) and realized that she continued her work individually. I really enjoy her muisc. But it’s even more amazing to see/hear her live. She might not come off quite as polished when heard live but the way she is able to reproduce her songs on stage is mind-boggling. She truly is a digital artist. DJs eat your hearts out.

And of course Royal Albert Hall enhances the experience that much more. Interestingly, not in an acoustic way. The building huge. The sound comes from distant loudspeakers. Smaller venues let you experience the sound with your entire body. Royal Albert Hall is far from it.

But on the other hand, it was huge and it was full of people. Imogen used the audience in some of her songs. It was thousands of people deliberately constructing a song together. A once-in-a-lifetime moment. Sadly, it was her only concert in the Royal Albert Hall. She will continue doing her tour but the other concerts will certainly be smaller venues.

So it was a quite memorable trip. Just too bad it sabotaged yet another weekend. I need to remember to keep the rest of the year clear of any additional activities in order to concentrate on my work.

Chris Crawford turned 60. Happy birthday, Mr. Crawford!

On his website, he wrote a fascinating article about how he feels being sixty. He visualized the time he spent and the time he has left using huge jars filled with colored beads.

Wait, what happens when you just eat them?

Each bead represents a day and each layer of color represents a decade. The big jar contains the days Mr. Craword has lived. The small jar contains the days he has left until he becomes 80 – a date where he reckons he will stop working. It’s a very potent and effective Memento Mori. It makes the passing of each day tangible. It reminds that we ought to cherish the time we have left as a valuable resource.

Mr. Crawford uses this opportunity to summarize his work so far. It seems like he feels he hasn’t achieved much. His goal was to develop Interactive Storytelling. However, even the most recent project, Storytron has been put on hold.

I would respond to that in a similar way that Tale of Tales did. Don’t worry Mr. Crawford. You have already succeeded. You have successfully planted ideas into the heads of game designers all around the world and they slowly begin to erode the established fallacies we have built the industry upon. As we speak the console cycle is breaking down while game developers are escaping the sinking ship of AAA game development into small indie and downloadable projects. They begin to embrace the the creative freedom afforded by small, agile teams. Meanwhile, the avant-garde is exploring the uncharted areas beyond the traditional notion of games. All this may not have been caused by you alone. But the insights you have been sharing with the community have accompanied the process all those years and will prove to be invaluable now, that the fertile ground has been laid bare.

On that note, I would consider myself a happy man being at your age and being able to look back at a body of work similar to yours. Also, you have still plenty of time left to continue exploring Interactive Storytelling. I’m looking forward to Le Morte D’Arthu and the next 20 years. Sto lat i na zdrowie!

Here is an interesting video I picked up from a Tweet by Alex Moseley (apparently forwarded from Simon Brookes). It’s a presentation by James Paul Gee on the relationship between games and learning. Specifically, he highlights how games are better at teaching things than school and attempts to explain why.

11. …
12. PROFIT!!!

It’s a quite interesting video that raises a lot of valid points. I especially like the observation that you can only absorb knowledge by relating it to something you already know or something you have experienced. The analogy with a game manual drives that idea home.

On the other hand, many of the observations are understood by teachers and applied in school. For example, the ideas of inhomogeneous groups where students teaching other students is actually being embraced by many modern school programs.

And finally, some of the qualities he mentions aren’t actually properties of games themselves. In the last example he describes the community of the game The Sims. This isn’t actually a property of the game. It is something that was created around the game. Even though there are certain aspects of the game might have been beneficial for the success of such community, the properties he describes should be attributed not to games but to Internet communities in general.

It’s still an inspiring video. Gee is a great speaker and does an excellent job at presenting complex topics in an emotional and very straight-forward way. It’s just a bit frightening when you realize that most people on this conference have never played the games he is talking about. I mean Yu-Gi-Oh? And those people are supposed to be TEACHERS?! Have they ever seen a child?

A quick general update. You might have noticed that I haven’t posted yesterday. Funny thing. After a quite exhausting week and a late night StarCraft 2 session I went to sleep. I woke up at 5pm. With the day being over before it even began I decided to take a timeout. Obviously, I was in need of some rest.

So I took it slow. Cooked some good food. Watched the EG Masters Cup and started a book. I’m reading The Reader on my Kindle right now. This is the first full-length book I’m actually reading on the Kindle. So far I have been checking out mostly samples. As I mentioned before, the experience is really great. I’m eating up the pages like nothing.

The book itself is weird. In focuses (among other things) on a relationship between a 15 years old boy and a 36 years old woman. It is told from the perspective of the boy. In a way, it’s a reverse-Lolita. I do like the way it undermines preconceived notions about gender roles. However, in times where there is just so much paranoia of pedophilia, reading it feels a bit uncomfortable. But maybe that’s the whole idea. I know the book has more to offer and I’m looking forward to see how it develops.

And today I did get some TRAUMA work in as well. I made some great progress. It looks like I should be able to reach the goal I set myself last weekend. More details tomorrow.

Speaking of books I have read recently. There is another one I haven’t written about yet. It’s called Don’t Be Such a Scientist.

Wait! What if I’m not a scientist?

It’s written by Randy Olson, a marine biologist, who turned into a movie director at some point. I heard about the book (again) on the Scepticality podcast and I was intrigued. The book is tries to highlight the mistakes many scientist and writers make when they communicate scientific facts to a broader audience. The reason why I found that interesting is because I wad playing with the idea of developing a Sci-Fi game that sticks to scientific fact rather than drifting off into the realm of leprechauns and unicorns. However, I’m concerned with falling into some common pitfalls. I have the impression that there are many Serious Games projects, where the designers focus so much on hammering a certain message home, that they forget to put the fun in. So I was expecting some practical advice on how to structure and develop a piece of work that contains science but manages to emotionalize it.

Unfortunately, I was kinda disappointed. Yes, Randy has collected some nice tips and he included a lot of humorous examples. However, the advice is very broad and abstract. The examples on the other hand are quite specific and it’s difficult to distill from them practical lessons. The chapters have captions like “Don’t Be So Literal Mided” or “Don’t Be So Unlikeable”. Granted, he does elaborate a little bit but it doesn’t really come together into a unified strategy.

And you know something isn’t quite right when you start reading things you straight out disagree with. In a very early chapter, he presents a model in which an audience has 4 organs that can be stimulated with a piece of work: the head, the heart, the gut and (basically) the dick. Over and over again he comes back to that model explaining that it’s easier to reach a wide audience the further you go down that list. I found that model quite simplistic and not really useful. Of course sex gets you a lot of eyeballs. But what good does it do you when you are basically tricking people to watch your stuff by injecting sexual content into it? Maybe you should have invested that extra effort to make your content inherently more interesting and valuable. Also what exactly is the difference between the heart and the gut? It’s never really explained.

Another thing that I disliked was that a lot of the examples from the book are taken from the couple of movies he did. Especially, he mentions Sizzle and Flock of Dodos quite a lot. For somebody who never watched the movies, the examples aren’t that helpful. It’s not like he uses his insider knowledge to take the movies apart and explain the process behind the scenes in detail. They remain superficial references.

Finally, even the sub-title is something I would argue with: “Talking Substance in an Age of Style”. It’s the tired, old false dichotomy of form vs. content. A model that is simply a mental dead-end when you are developing a piece of work with any sort of ambition. Excellence in communication and pretty much any design discipline comes from not being able to distinguish form from content anymore.

That doesn’t mean that everything in the book is wrong. The advice is certainly useful for scientists, who never thought about how to communicate their work properly. However, as a Game Designer, I need something more in-depth and specific.

I was wondering, do you guys know games / serious games that try to teach or simulate something but forget to evoke enthusiasm for their subject? Maybe we can get a discussion started to sort out common problems.