Costikan

Greg Costikan has a wealth of good thoughts on his blog today. Also, his essay "I Have No Words &I Must Design", was one of the essays I read a few years ago when I was coming to terms with my ideas towards games.

I want to note, I have wanted to develop games ever since I was 11 years old. My first program that I created on my own (unassigned), was a simple "game" for the Apple IIE. I had a fascination with fighting games, I think because the first videogame I remember playing was Karate Champ" with my stepfather (dad) at an arcade machine at some camp. Him and I didn't get along very well when I was young, and it was the biggest memory in my life of us having a sort of "bond". But that really struck an emotional note, and looking back, I believe that may have been the single moment that set me on my path.

So when I first found out about computers, and I found the power I had to "create", I was immediately engaged. I have always been a builder. My parents eventually stopped giving me toys other than Legos, because they realized that they would hardly be used. Well, legos and army men, because I had a fascination with the plastic army men as well.

I'm getting off subject.

Anyways, for some reason I picked up computers extremely easily. I knew I wanted to do more than what we were learning in class, so I eventually I came up with the idea to emulate the game that my dad and I played. This motivation made me breeze right through our assignments, so that I could spend extra time in class working on my program. I would go home and write lines and lines of code (graphics programming in Apple Basic wasn't very easy), and come back and type it all in. Ahh, the good ol days *tear*.

Looking back, I probably did a lot more work than I had to. But the thing with me is, I may not be extremely intelligent, but I make up for it with sheer tenacity. If you get me dedicated on something, I will get it done.

So I made a little program that had two guys, one was a white guy in blue pants, the other was a black guy in red pants. the program gave you two choices - punch or kick. When you picked one, it played an animation of the black guy either punching or kicking the white guy, and it would display "Winner!" or "Trojan!", respectively. I forget why I picked "Trojan!" as a winning statement. But, that was my first "game" so to speak. And I was immediately hooked.

Ever since that first program, my life has consistently revolved around pursuing the development of games. I made a bunch of QBasic games throughout my years in junior and senior high. The problem was that my ambition was a little overboard. I constantly wanted to make a "Mortal Kombat" clone. Now, looking back, I realize that it's mighty tough for a young teenager with no home computer and accelerated courses to make a MK clone by himself. I did make a couple really rudimentary games, though. It's too bad that they are lost forever. Eventually, during highschool, the sheer weight of trying to balance my chores, working a part-time job, taking accelerated classes, fighting to participate in clubs, and managing a social life (I was big into punk and the music scene back then), mixed with the fact that PASCAL (the language I was learning in class) was not very graphical (this was before I found out about the power of Windows GDI), I eventually resigned myself to developing a text-based adventure (which I still have some source code for), until my late junior year.

Then I got a computer, it was given to us by a friend of the family, and I can see why. It was 1997, and the computer I got was a TI-994A. Looking back, man this thing was so outdated. It had a 32K expansion kit, that's the size of a two XBox's stacked on top of each other. You turned it on and it sounded like a vacuum cleaner. I didn't have the speech synthesizer, unfortunately, but I did have a floppy drive (360K), and a plethora of ol TI-994A magazines.

On a sidenote, one TI-994A magazine had an interview with Will Wright. It came at a perfect time, as I was fighting with my father very hard to attend college. He was expressly against me furthering my education. Wright's interview gave me motivation to continue fighting. He is one of my personal heroes, and I hold meeting him as one of the best moments of my life.

The good thing about the old magazines like that, as opposed to today, is that they gave you tons of games in terms of source code. So I would spend hours, typing in undocumented code, so I could get a homemade version of Frogger to work. But I learned a lot, because eventually I started breaking down and analyzing the code. I even developed a couple of my own games, although they were horrible.

After a couple years of college, and a fiasco where I decided I never wanted to be a programmer, I eventually came to the realization that my frustration stemmed from school not teaching me the skills that I needed to create the games I wanted, and that if I wanted to be a game programmer, I would have to just learn to program games.

Thank god for Andre LaMothe. His "Windows Game Programming for Dummies" is what gave me my start, and has led me to where I am now.

But back to the original point of the post.

I always wanted to be a Programmer in the field of games. Contrary to what some people believe, I don't think you need to be a "gamer" in order to be a good game programmer. Quite the opposite, a good game programmer is a good programmer. Good programmers are interested in their work, but playing a game, and making a game, are two different "games". A good programmer spends time finding out how to program better, not sitting on the couch playing Nintendo. A good programmer spends their time in front of the computer, programming, trying to figure out how to page flip the video buffer, not playing countless hours of Starcraft. Now, given, you can do both, but if you have limited time in your day, a good programmer will choose option A, while a "gamer" will choose option B.

That has always been my problem, because I'm always juggling at least 3 things at once (work, school, social life), I have limited time in my day. So I try to use that for option A (although lately, I've been kinda worn out, but that's just temporary). So I'm not a gamer. Not to say I don't play games. If you get me hooked on a game, I play the crap out of it (Halo, Prince of Persia, Pikmin, Diablo, Warcraft). But almost because of that, I stay away from them. Instead I take my time, reading about real-time collision detection. As an aside, I found myself staring at LaMothe's "Tips and Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus" when I woke up this morning. Seems I slept with it like a teddy bear last night!

However, I get a lot of flack for my thoughts. "How can you make games if you don't play them?" I'm always asked that, usually by people who don't know how the division of games usually goes nowadays (design, programming, art - all their own areas of development). One night I got so fed up, I emailed Robin about it (another person on my list of heroes). I was later in for a surprise, seems like it's a valid argument, as not only did she respond, but she posted it in her blog as well.

But now, my thoughts toward the subject is changing. I mean, looking at where I started, I wanted to make games because I wanted to build something AWESOME. Like totally rad. But now, I've dived into the belly of the beast. A lot of time, I'm not just thinking about developing an awesome computer game. Rather, I'm reading all these websites, all this research by people like Juul, Frasca, Zimmerman, Costikan, etc., and coming up with my own questions. What are games? What can they be? How can they affect people? So on and so forth.

There's a difference in viewpoints. I find myself with this big black blob of silly putty, this "game" so to speak. It's like a lump of clay in my hands, right now, it means nothing, it does not exist. So I look at it, and I think, what is the significance of this damn thing? What the hell am I making exactly? These are bigger questions.

In the industry, I will probably be given a set of goals and tasks, and I implement them. The why will be to earn a paycheck. I will be a programmer, implementing the ideas of the designer, it won't be my place to ask.

Maybe this is a lot like graphic design, or shooting commercials. There is no "why"'s and "what"'s, you just do what you're told and maybe slip some of your influence in them. It's the way it needs to be nowadays as games grow abnormally large. There is no individual personality. Games are a product if you want to survive off of them.

But guess what.

We still have digital camcorders, we still have editing software. My point? The director of a commercial may spend his or her day, doing what they are told, not really able to think about the bigger questions pertaining to their product. But they can come home, get a few friends together, and actually work on something that addresses these questions. At work, make the product; at home, make art.

That's where I find myself now. I think that's why I'm searching for more. I know that I'm going to be making someone else's creations for a paycheck. But I'm an artist at heart, experimenting with a medium that's full of potential. At work, I'll make the product.

But at home, I want to make art.

experimental gameplay

So after my thoughts last night, I'm looking into the Experimental Gameplay workshop.
here's the link to the main website. http://www.experimental-gameplay.org/

Gameplay is the key elements here. Gameplay are the verbs that the user enacts upon the nouns. Or rather, the set of sentences that can be created with these noun/verb interactions.

Gameplay is the core of our medium. "Our" signifying game developers.

I wrote a bit about this in an essay a couple years ago. I'll try to summarize.

Each dimension has a corresponding art form.
Except the 1st dimension, which I'm not so sure about.

The second dimension has conventional "art". Paintings, drawings, murals, photographs, etc. Each of these are a sort of manipulation of 2 dimensional space, usually by varing color at a specific x, y position.

When we add the z plane, we get the third dimension. The 3rd dimension translates to "real space", ie, the world we live in. Go to your local art museum and browse the sculpture section. Here we have both the "color" of the exact coordinate of 3D space, but also another variable - "existence".

Mathematically, time is considered the 4th dimension. so now we have 4 variables (x,y,z, and t). a collection of (x,y,z) points correspond to a specific t. when t is viewed in ascending order, we get another variable - "sequence". The sequence is core element of a 4th dimensional art form, it's what separates the art from from others. 4th dimensional art forms are theatrical performances.

Ahh, but what about films? good question.
Films are 2 dimensional art forms with a t variable. I still count them as 4 dimensional, along with comic books, because the t variable changes, but the z variable stays the same (0).

Now, mathematically, a collection of 4th dimensional objects create a 5th dimension. The 5th dimension, if you believe in modern physics, signifies "alternate realities" and "parallel universes", buzzwords which have captured the mind of science fiction writers.

the 5th dimension adds another variable, which I'm going to call p (for possibility).

so imagine that the viewer of this medium is at instance (x,y,z, 0,0)

for the next increase of t from 0 to 1, the rules of gameplay says that there are a multitude of (x,y,z,1,p)'s. The set of these values constitute what these "rules" are, as they limit what possibilities are available.

So, does adding the variable of p (possibility), preclude games from being an "art" form?

I guess, that entails a definition of what art really is, which takes a rather trancedental view.

thoughts?

A little weird

I'm feeling a little strange tonight. I've been feeling strange for a while.
I'm sitting up, trying to think about where I fit in with everything.

I haven't worked on any games lately, and haven't thought much about my theories of them, because I've been so busy with school that I can barely think. But I still believe that there's something there, that can be used for a lot of good.

I really want to experiment with AI. I think that's the next step. Yes, I think graphics are fascinating, especially when you consider it's just "fooling" the viewer with bunch of math! But there's something about the essential element of "thinking" that just intrigues me. There hasn't been a definitive answer to the question "what is intelligence?" It seems any attempts to provide a quantitative answer ends up with the definition being thrown out the window.

So how can a machine think? And what does it mean for a machine to think?

This is where I must repeat that the definition of a machine thinking HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH RESEMBLING A HUMAN. That is way too ambitious, way too complex.

But think about it. Does a fish think? Does a bird think? Does a snail think?

So if we made a machine that emulated a snail, but not a human, can we capture intelligence?

And can we make intelligence useful? What are our constraints?

Games are the best field, because games revolve around a limited set of nouns (objects which constitute a world, described by a set of adjectives which describe the objects attributes). In this world, the verbs are cut down to a limited set. The set of the allowable verbs are "rules".
These rules are described by a set of adverbs. In reality, a fancy graphic animation is nothing more than an adverb. The better the graphics, the fancier the adverb. Same thing with the description of object, a nice texture is nothing more than a nice adjective.

But really, the nouns and verbs are what constitute the actual language. The boy pets the dog.
That is the main point. The fact that the boy is young, and the dog is brown, gives you a better description of what we are describing. But in reality, we are talking about boys and dogs.

Look around you, look at the world. Think about how many nouns and verbs there are to describe the world we live in. Way too many to simulate!

Compare it to a game. Now we can create a finite set.

So the question is, if we create a sort of intelligence revolving around a limited set of nouns and verbs, does this translate to intelligence when the our language is expanded?

That's the question. I do not know the answer. I may never know the answer, but my intent is to better educate my guess.

hi

Hi, this is Lucas. This used to be Myriam's site, but she gave it up. I thought that rubbishcentral was way too cool of a name to go to waste. So I took it. I'm still going to post in my livejournal, but I'm looking at this blog as a bit of a departure. I want to write a book, and here's where I plan to keep my notes.

I don't really have a plan for my book right now. I don't know the structure, I don't know what it will be about. But I know that deep down I have something to say. The problem is I have a lot of things to say, none of them which are terribly important.

But maybe, if I have enough unimportant things,they may turn out to be important. who knows.

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