ulo.tricho.us

So, Last weekend at the Sandbox Symposium, I had the good fortune to find myself running a Guitar Hero 2 Co-op Mode Tournament with Elena Seigman of Harmonix, Lead Designer on Karaoke Revolution Party, and Producer on Guitar Hero 2.  While the E3 build she brought offered little new information about the hotly anticipated sequel, I did get to hear lots of cool little tidbits about the game and life at Harmonix.

Guitar Hero 2 is scheduled to hit the shelves in time for Black Friday, and while they're not in crunch yet, they've done a lot of work in making substantial refinements to the gameplay and the visuals.  Of course, we'll get all new songs, venues, character models and mocap for returning characters (including a much improved ripper), and at least two new characters.  First is Dax DeVille, the Rockabilly Guy seen in the E3 demo, where he was named 'King Kendall', after Harmonix Artist Jason Kendall, who also did the awesome tutorial voice-overs in Guitar Hero, and is the singer of Harmonix House Band Monkey Steals the Peach.  Elena also has a girl rock trio of Harmonix staff who hope to get a bonus song in Guitar Hero 2; however, the name of their band is 'Vagiant', which complicates things just a little.  Harmonix Management even built a practice room in the basement of their Boston office in order to encourage this type of extracirricular behavior.

Elena didn't tell me the name of another new character, a Norwegian Death Rocker, who, as she mentioned (with an Achewood-class level of detail), hates big dogs.  It's very clear that Harmonix takes these characters very seriously; their personalities are as lovingly rendered as the Guitar Hero venues, and I'm sure they have larger lives in the hive mind at Harmonix that we can only glimpse.

One of the most obvious enchancements is a new venue lighting system that allow the audio guys who lay out the gems to send commands to the lighting system to matchup with big changes in the music, just like a real rock show.  The lighting is really improved, and and behaves just how you'd expect to see the lights run at a rock show, except for one thing: some of the 'audio guys' have real rock show experience, and set the lights to blackout during breaks in the music.  However, this doesn't work in Guitar Hero, when the only time that the player looks at the world is during breaks in the music.  They came up with an elegant solution that preserves the blackout feeling without reducing the view.

The art continues to stand out in Guitar Hero 2; all the menu screens are again fantastic, especially the coop level select screen, which features a 2-headed, 3-legged, 2-axed mutant rocker.  One interesting fact is that the saving screen from GH1, with the man holding his ears, was done by Shepard Fairey, creator of the Andre the Giant has a Posse sticker, and spawner of the subsequent meme.  Most of the posters were done by Rock Poster artists from outside Harmonix, and they've really delivered the same high-quality fit and finish that Guitar Hero displays.  Also, the success of Guitar Hero has led to demand for in-game endorsements, and while the band will now feature Orange amplifiers (and a sponsored drum kit too), Harmonix takes this super-seriously and will only put the right stuff in the game.  One of the venues is the Vans Warped Tour, and the stage is a medieval dungeon, with awesome success effects.  

Co-op mode is truly fantastic, especially since each player can choose their own difficulty.  I'm forseeing playing a lot of that with Nemo.  We'll also get an improved multiplayer mode, Pro Faceoff mode where each player plays exactly the same notes, and a practice mode with speed adjustable by section.  It sounds like there will be several more original masters in addition to Primus' John the Fisherman, which had to be completely remastered for use in the game (recording technology has changed a lot since 1989).  Core gameplay remains mostly unchanged, although Hammer-ons and Pull-offs will be tweaked without the need to hold down the lower frets, and the window of success for hammer-ons is moving back a bit.  While three-note chords have been added, it sounds like they've decided to eliminate chords that bridge from fret 1-5.  Even though people love these because they feel so, well, so guitarry, Harmonix feels strongly that even people with small hands should be able to finish the expert mode.  That's a good point, but maybe we could get a small hand switch option… I'd hate to lose that particular challenge!

Elena confirmed that the window for hitting a note successfully in the same at all difficulties (although they've argued about that) and that wiggling the whammy bar as fast as possible when applicable is the path to maximum star power (although they've argued about that).  She also said that Star Power was originally intended to be turned on by raising the neck, and turned off by lowering it, but the tilt switches were just not reliable enough for it to work that way.  It would be awesome to have pressure sensitivity in the controller, but she thought it unlikely due to cost issues (I'd rather have a foot pedal to stomp on).  She also said that Harmonix would love to do a sequel to Amplitude, but it's become a lot harder to sell a music game without a peripheral.  And while there is a loading card in the GH2 Demo that promises Accordion Hero in Summer 2008, it remains just a joke and frequent focus of my own feverish dreams.

For the tournament, we let teams qualify at the difficulty level of their choice throughout the day, and then brought back the top 8 teams to play the song of their choice on hard difficulty for the highest score.  Because scores are not normalized from song to song, the advantage laid with the longer songs, so we heard War Pigs over and over again.  However, a team from UNC-Charlotte took the top prize.  It was really great to get to play Guitar Hero 2 so much (YYZ is HARD!  What's next, King Crimson?), and it was fantastic to get to talk to Elena and Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom.  It's clear that Guitar Hero 2 is being crafted with as much love and serious thought as the original, and that Harmonix is about to put another Smash Hit into Red Octane's (and now, Activision's) hands.

Back in February, I got an email from an address at playstation.sony.com. It was from Alan Heirich, an Ann Arbor expat who’s been working on the graphics architecture of the mighty Playstation 3. He was on a committee that was putting together ACM’s first ever videogame symposium, and they wanted to have tournaments as a part of the event. And they wanted me to organize and run them! Once I got a hold of myself, I found myself an events chair on a committee consisting of some very amazing people from around the growing academic videogame world, led by Drew Davidson, recently named director of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon.

SIGGRAPH is the annual conference and expo for the ACM Graphics Special Interest Group, which drew a crowd of around 30,000 in 2005. As a large conferences, SIGGRAPH has a little fleet of colocated pre- and post-conferences for smaller audiences. The Sandbox Symposium would be the two days right before SIGGRAPH in Boston, and ACM was interested in the idea enough to fund an inaugural conference just about videogames. Not Interactive Entertainment, VIDEO GAMES. Like any Symposium, Sandbox would include peer-reviewed papers (including papers like ‘The Submissive Speaks: The Semiotics of Visuality in Virtual BDSM Fantasy Play‘) and panel discussions. Unlike most Symposiums, it would also include Katamari Damacy, DDR, Karaoke Revolution, Halo, and Soul Calibur III tournaments.

It was great to get the opportunity to envision two days of tournaments and open plays for adults, trying to cover as wide a range of games as possible on the cheap, and looking at the finished schedule, this is something I would be totally geeked to go to if I wasn’t already going. Hey, do what you know, you know? Also, I get to do things that I’d never get to do at the Library, like have a Karaoke Revolution tournament with a Cash Bar.

However, the most exciting thing about Sandbox is that being in Boston, Drew was able to get Harmonix themselves to come run a Guitar Hero tournament, and they’re even going to bring the still-in-development Guitar Hero 2! Nemo and I have been playing Guitar Hero nonstop for the past month or so, and it is simply one of the very best videogames yet made. I’ll provide a full report next week of my Date with Guitar Hero 2 and as much information as I can get out of Elena Siegman, a Lead Designer at Harmonix, a woman responsible for some of my very favorite games.

This should be a very fun weekend. Stay tuned.

Hello Blog, How’ve you been?

I was invited to speak at ALA 2006 by Jed Moffitt, IT Director at KCLS. When I was there in April, Jed took me to XXX Root Beer Drive-In for lunch, which I had seen on boingboing a few weeks previously. It was a fantastic place, and the frozen mugs were quite enormous. Visiting New Orleans at this stage in its recovery, I was led to expect desolation, complete with tumbleweeds, but there was traffic, and a sense of normalcy, excepting the omnipresent tarps and trailers. The airport was a little unsettling, however, deserted, with closed shops and squashed palmetto bugs; but on the way downtown from the airport we passed an oil change place with an LED sign reading ‘Welcome Librarians’.

If I had been there before, I might feel differently, but things seemed ok downtown to me, there was a vibrancy that I was not expecting. A lot of tourist shops were only open because of ALA, and there was lots of construction, but about the biggest inconvenience I experienced during the trip was having to wait for silverware. Being in the French Quarter on a Saturday night was quite an amalgam of sounds and smells, although Erin told me it always smelled like that. I was surprised to find 80’s rock as the dominant live music on Bourbon Street; I actually heard two different bands play Jessie’s Girl near-simultaneously.

Every meal was just amazing, I had étouffée at The Gumbo Shop twice, and fried boudin at Cochon twice, and had corned beef hash with creole hollendaise; the only thing I wanted to try but didn’t get a chance to was a Beignet. Cochon was really an incredible meal; I went there for lunch, and it was so delicious, I went back for dinner, with Jenny Levine, Kathryn Deiss, and Chad Haefele. We had a wonderful waiter named Nathan, who recommended that we get the hamhock, that none of us would have otherwise ordered, and it was just amazing, falling off the bone and all that. I asked Nathan for a breakfast recommendation, and he suggested Stanley (brother to sister-restaurant Stella) where I had the creole corned beef hash mentioned above. I then saw him the next night at Hagen-Dahs right off of Jackson Square (I was having a Mayan Milkshake) and got to thank him for his recommendation and meet his girlfriend and her very cute dog.

Outside the carnival of free crap of the exhibit hall, I was sitting on a bench in the convention center concourse, making some tweaks to my presentation, and a guy comes and sits down to my right and opens his laptop too. Someone walking by looked at the bench, and said, "Hey, it’s like that commercial! You’re the Mac, and you’re the PC!" From his perspective, I was on the right, in my tshirt and rumply blazer with cargo pants and sneakers, and beard and too much hair, with my Mac, and this other guy was on the left, with a dell PC in his lap, dark suit, tie, clean-shaven, and slicked-back. We both lauged, and then the guy said "What are you working on?"

PC Guy: "A Sales Spreadsheet"
Me: "A Videogame Presentation"

I wanted to get a picture, but Mr. PC left shortly thereafter. If only he had sneezed, we could have uploaded it to youtube.

My presentation was opposite a somewhat surprise appearance by Laura Bush, but we still had well over 100 in our session. Jed had asked me to speak for about an hour, and although I lost one lady in the first 2 minutes, it was a very fun and receptive audience. Matt Gullett then talked about all the cool classes and stuff he’d done at Bloomington before his recent move to join Kelly Czarnecki at the amazing Imaginon in Charlotte. Kevin Ferst talked about starting a gaming service as a nongamers, and Beth then talked about Reader’s advisory for gamers (and said I talked in Sound Bites =).

I also went to a YALSA gaming discussion group and got to meet some other people doing gaming events of all types and talk about some of the issues.

The exhibit hall is really quite striking simply for the sheer expense it represents. I can’t help but wonder how much more we pay for every single thing we buy to fund that sort of bonanza. Especially because it seems that it only exists because we, as customers, are too lazy to do our homework. We can only shop at the mall. It is a little unsettling that a trade show is a sign of normalcy. I did notice the booth that sold rolling suitcases you could use to store all the crap you were picking up, and quite a lot of people were pulling them around. I only picked up a few pieces of crap from the exhibits, the best thing being a CD sample of Shel Silverstein’s work of genius, Runny Babbit.

The hospitality was incredible, the food amazing, it was very hot, and just a wonderful trip. It’s hard to understand the devastation when it’s hidden from view and everything seems so normal. Life goes on.

Last week, I visited the King County Library System to present two gaming workshops to KCLS staff. KCLS has developed a fantastic initiative to get some gaming hardware out to some of their 44 branches without pushing anyone too far outside their comfort zone.

One of the exciting things about this initiative is that it started at the top; KCLS Director Bill Ptacek returned from ALA last year all fired up about gaming, and set KCLS Teen Coordinator Barbara Carmody to develop a program. Barbara initially thought it was a terrible idea; now, a few months later, she has asked for and received a PS2 for Christmas (and is expecting a dance pad for Mother’s Day), is addicted to Katamari Damacy, and is eagerly anticipating Brain Age on DS. Barbara’s enthusiasm for the project is infectious, and her genuine interest in the games teens want to play gives the entire program a solid foundation.

With around $50,000 (out of a $71 million budget) to work with, Barbara has put together a set of well-varied gaming kits for branches of different sizes of capabilities, and the first are rolling out now. The local newspaper ran a typically terrible article (that Barbara saved) about the initiative, complete with the old strategy guide chestnut, photo of crazed teenage library volunteer, and an honest-to-god, threat-or-menace lede. The article prompted a great letter (of support) to the editor from a patron, and even picked up an elusive (and slightly derisive) kotaku post.

The article touches on what my dad might call the salami issue; there’s only so much salami to go around, and a common complaint is that doing something frivolous like a gaming program takes salami away from worthier pursuits. As a public library, any use of salami that involves the public actually eating the salami is an appropriate, even optimal, use of the salami. You might even say that the best uses of the salami are those where the highest percentage of salami reaches the public; those with the lowest salami overhead.  New salami delivery systems that are able to deliver salami to consumers who historically haven’t gotten their fair share of that public salami have a value to the public organization greater than simply the amount of salami they deliver.

Gaming events are salami for gamers. It’s what they want. Public libraries have an important role in promoting literacy, but there’s also this other big system of learning institutions, and that’s kind of their turf, you know? Our relationships with our patrons do not need to be exclusively pedantic; as public libraries, we have a recreational component to our mission, so putting a higher value on — and providing more salami to — the kids who like to write for fun as opposed to the kids who like to play videogames for fun is making a value judgement about how they spend their leisure time. Most of our mission statements make it pretty clear that we’re not supposed to do that. Not everyone is a writer, not everyone is a recreational reader. We can bemoan their tastes, we can try to change them, but it’s their library too.

But I digress, sheesh. The wonderful thing about the workshops at KCLS is that I think some minds were changed. Even some of the voices from the article were playing Mario Kart and warming to the concept. KCLS has been doing open plays and having good success; one of my goals was to give them some ideas and encourage them to take the next step and do some tournaments. Open play is a great place to start, especially when you’re just getting used to setting thing up and handling a new audience; but some issues that rapidly crop up during open play, such as kids getting bored of games and wanting to switch every 5 minutes, or just not sharing and playing nice, are totally eliminated when holding a tournament.

For example, when we do open play at AADL, most players will only play mario kart for 15-20 minutes before wanting to switch to another game. However, in our tournament format, we’re about to start our third consecutive year of playing Mario Kart and the players are eager for more. The excitement of a tournament introduces a new level to the title that open play can’t touch.

So, after some scenes from our DVD, and some discussion about built-in tournament modes and simple excel-based tournaments, people seemed less daunted by the prospect of organizing a tournament, and hopefully, more convinced that games have a place at the library. There’s a lot more to talk about from this trip, but it’s great to see a big system taking such bold steps!

Library Camp is coming up at AADL on Friday, April 14th. This event is an unconference using the open space format, which throws several much-needed wrenches into the typical conventions of, well, conventions. First, instead of suffering through a dull or irrelevant session, looking for a polite chance to ditch, you are encouraged — even required — to walk out of any session you find unproductive or uninteresting. Also, no pre-arranged agenda. One of the first things we’ll do at the event is propose some sessions and put together the schedule for the day based on who’s there and what they’re looking for.

In the meantime, I’ve thought of a few things that might be interesting sessions for the event. There is a great group of people coming, and I think it’s a great opportunity to actually produce some things. So, here are my ideas for sessions:

• Library 2.0: Threat or MENACE? (What does it mean, what’s to come?)
• Tags in the OPAC: the roles and balance of taxonomies and folksonomies
• IM applications in Libraries, current and potential
• Reclaiming Serendipity: Lost Features of the card catalog that OPACs should offer
• DRM and the future of library downloads
• Gaming in the library: thinking big
• Library Podcasting: Projects and Possibilities
• Netflix and other alternate circulation schemes
• Stats and metrics: new ways to collect and analyze use data
• Online community building: starting points and brainstorming
• hackfest?
• collaborative authoring of a document, maybe a guide to library 2.0 tools?

The idea is that sessions are interactive, more of a collaborative effort than a presentation, and I think we’ll try to make sure that there are bloggers in each session, and that posts are tagged accordingly. I’ve posted these ideas on the Library2 wiki, so please add to and modify this list.

Also at AADL on the 14th is the first-ever AADL-GT Retro Octathalon, an olympic-style event for all ages where all competitors will compete for overall and single-event high scores on 8 vintage (pre-1990) video games, with a championship for the highest scorers at the end of the night. Adult qualifiers start at 6, so you can attend Library Camp all day, and then give your thumbs some much-needed exercise.

These are going to be two very cool events, and a very busy day!