Archive for the ‘geek mystique’ Category

25.02.10 girl geek dinner links

Last night I gave a talk at the Montreal Geek Girl Dinner about the future of storytelling and emotion in videogames.

Afterwards, several members of the amazing Station C audience requested references to some of the games I mentioned, so I’ll delay my post on how Jane Austen has finally made it into the modern space opera to provide these.

Games with good story elements
Mass Effect: The one with the romance.
Bioshock: The one with the Fountainhead references.
Portal: The one with the cake. Tells a fantastic story without cutscenes. Available on PC through Steam for 20$.

Top recent Xbox/PS games mentioned
Some of these are also available on PC.
Modern Warfare 2
Mass Effect 2. You can also read my take on the first one here.
Assassin’s Creed 2
Uncharted 2

Other games mentioned
Execution (free)
Wedding Dash is available for free download (for an hour, then 7$ to purchase permanently) on Big Fish Games, along with a host of fun time-management and other games.

And for other meaningful games, you may want to try
The Marriage (free)
Gravitation (free, donations encouraged)
Braid on Xbox live

Thanks to all that showed up, I had the best night in ages! (And Canada trouncing Russia was just a bonus!). Huge love to Tanya and Station C.

Next post: How Mass Effect 2 put Mr. Darcy into a Canadian commercial from the 80s! Really! Honest this time!

19.02.10 first person digital

Public service announcement: Are you a creative English-speaking woman in Quebec? You could get up to 25000$ in funding for an interactive project!

Filmmakers, photographers, new-media creators, graphic designers, sound artists, programmers, interactive storytellers, writers, and other techie creative creatures are invited to apply to First Person Digital, a new program set up by the NFB with Studio XX.

Representatives will be present at my Girl Geek Dinner talk next week.

You can also listen to one of the organizers talk about FPD on Wednesday’s edition of CKUT’s XX files.

Deadline for application is March 1st. Go!

Next post: How Mass Effect 2 put Mr. Darcy into a Canadian commercial from the 80s.

17.12.09 flamewars are the fountainhead of human creativity

Note: This is a post highly similar to this one, but since our audience is completely different and I’d rather post it here than have people not follow the link, I hope Darius will forgive me. So…

Darius over at TinySubversions has a much more entertaining and detailed account of this little gaming fracas (go read it!), but in short: Gamasutra, a leading game website, publishes an article about Spelunky, an indie game garnering much critical praise.

Adam Coate, himself an indie developer, leaves a comment complaining that his game deserves more attention than Spelunky, and isn’t getting any.

Debate ensues, with commenters suggesting Adam should improve his attitude to improve his coverage.

Notably, a writer from indiegames.com tells Adam that he received Adam’s original e-mail about his game. However, the e-mail contained no helpful information (like links) to help him find, play and eventually cover the game. The writer came up with nothing even after searching exhaustively for it. He helpfully counsels Adam to learn a few things about marketing (and even eventually proceeds to write a guide to indie game marketing).

Adam keeps whining, eventually submitting the gem: “Miyamoto never had to work for press like this”.

(This is Shigeru Miyamoto, of Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong and Zelda fame).

Commenters in Darius’ account of this have a field day, and someone brilliantly comes up with an idea for a t-shirt.

I know I’m going to see this at gaming conventions and laugh my ass off.

16.02.09 philosophers, physicists, help!

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I’ve blinded myself with science.

Every time I read about physics, I get stuck at the whole Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle thing. I actually remember straining to understand it one night as a (very nerdy) teenager, and later on in science college, I would spew back the theory without ever really understanding it. Now I’ve finally picked up A Brief History of Time, and sure enough, nothing is more certain than my getting blocked at the Uncertainty Principle.

Here’s my problem:

Some believe that because everything in the universe is governed by a set of rules, if you know the state and velocity of everything in the universe at a given point, you could infer, by applying the rules of the universe, the state of everything at every other time. Hence everything can be said to be predictable. Let’s call this Determinism, which was at a time accepted by the scientific community. That makes sense to me.

But Heisenberg says that you can never measure the position of a particle perfectly, without changing its velocity (this is because you’d have to shed light on the particle to measure its position, and the light would alter the particle’s velocity). So, you can’t ever perfectly know the position AND velocity of a particle. Either you’re uncertain about its position, or about its velocity. Fair enough.

What’s always bugged me about this is that it seems to rest on nothing but an experimental limitation. Just because an experimental limitation introduces uncertainty, it doesn’t follow that uncertainty is a fundamental property of the universe. Yet Hawking explicity says it is; that this is the case no matter what experimental method you use to measure velocity or position. Why?

Hawking even says that some supernatural being could know all (ie. not be limited by experimental limitations), but “such models of the universe are not of much interest to us ordinary mortals”. Well, why wasn’t it a problem to accept Determinism, when there are also obvious experimental limitations to knowing the state and velocity of every particle in the universe?

More importantly, why must the very way the universe works be affected by our ability to measure it? It seems ballsy to suggest that the universe itself operates uncertainly, simply because we ordinary mortals can never know it perfectly. Sure, science must measure and predict, and the introduction of this principle increases the accuracy of our predictions. But why not say that’s the best science can do to be predictive? Why does it follow that this uncertainty is a property of the universe itself?

In other words, why assert that God plays dice with the universe? Why not say, “God doesn’t play dice, it just seems to our imperfect observational abilities that he does”?

12.06.08 why helvetica is a good documentary

Because

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it doesn’t try to entertain first and inform second, it does the reverse. Yet the font geeks that are interviewed are fabulously entertaining. Teutons are hilarious.

Because at the end of it I had no fixed idea what my position on the topic was. That’s actually huge.

Because I have never before considered the societal impact of a font, and now I’m actually wrangling with the issue of whether Helvetica deserves its position as king of fonts. I had never considered this topic, and now it keeps me up all night, I see nothing but dancing letters in that middleground between sleep and waking.

And because, deservingly or no, Helvetica really is the king of fonts, it’s effectively changed the way I look at everything.

28.06.07 one more thing to be geeky about

I’ve been wondering if it’s geeky of me to be reading The New Penguin History of the World.

Then yesterday I got a total thrill hearing that the mummy of Hatshepsut’s been found.

And I didn’t have to wonder anymore.

19.04.07 wow.

I have to admire this kind of dedication. Here’s a girl who’s such a big fan of Wonder Woman, and so wants to play her in the upcoming movie, that she made a trailer of it starring herself as the Amazon, as an audition tape.

I still say Jessica Biel.

11.04.07 i need a vacation

The ball from MetroidI’m working towards first playable these days (basically the first major deliverable of a game, where the first level is usually delivered at near-final quality). This weekend I dreamt that my game’s hero had been replaced by the ball from Metroid in my first playable build.

I know it sounds silly, but it was really scary.

I’m terrified to go to sleep.

30.10.06 what i’m not wearing for halloween

Last weekend, the Scotsmontonian and I were walking down Whyte avenue in Edmonton when suddenly, something caught my eye in a shop window.

Actually, it wasn’t in the shop window, it was in the shop but I saw it through the window. Actually, it was on the farthest wall of the shop, but I managed to bionically zoom in on it through the window. I couldn’t believe it. It was my long-lost treasure of childhood. Something I’d been dreaming of finding again for the past 26 years: the perfect Wonder Woman costume.

26 years ago, at the tender age of eight, I outgrew the Wonder Woman costume my mom had lovingly made me. I’ve been wanting another one ever since. Lightspeedmom says I waited impatiently (duh) by the sewing machine. All I remember is that it had straps on the bustier, which was incorrect, but mom wisely wouldn’t have it any other way.

I quickly broke my “I’ll-never-do-the-girlfriend-thing-of-making-you-wait-as-I-try-on-clothes” promise to the Scotsmontonian and swiftly dragged him into the shop. Minutes later, the last costume was taken off the mannequin, tried on and bought. I was as happy as when I was seven.

The previous day, Justice League Heroes had come out and the Scotsmontonian purchased it for us. This is a game in which you get to be various superheroes, including Wonder Woman. So I got to play Wonder Woman, dressed like Wonder Woman.

I’ve since returned from Edmonton and have hung the costume among my normal clothes in the closet. There something intensely cool about seeing it hang there, like Diana Prince’s laundry day.

Morals: it doesn’t have to be Halloween to dress up like Wonder Woman, and like the guy says, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. Again.

17.07.06 anti-hero

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I enter the cafeteria this morning, jonesing for my morning shot. There’s a conversation going on already, and a guy I don’t know but have seen around is saying,

“Ugh, I hate superheroes anyway.”

I walk by him and, putting my trusty Wonder Woman mug under the coffee faucet, shoot him an unmistakable “you suck” look.

“What?”

- Well, that’s like saying you don’t like Jews. I mean, what if there are superheroes around, whose daytime identity is to be game developers?

- I’ll take my chances, he smiles. Have a nice day, Wonder Woman.

I get out of work about ten hours later (hey, we’re Beta). The Anti-Supite is impatiently waiting to jaywalk across the busiest street in Montreal, calculating just the right moment to dash between speeding cars. I walk up discreetly behind him.

“You know, if you get hit you’re on your own”.

He waits. Too bad.

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