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Today, I split the group up into 4 teams with the intent of them staying in those teams for the rest of the class. In the open school way, each group covered the age gamut of the class, although I was sorely tempted to make a team out of the 3 Andrews and 2 Patricks and call it Full House. Teams can earn points for good guesses or right answers during the discussion, plus points from their team’s turns in the battle arena. I had put down Physics and math as the topic, but I really started with “What is a videogame made out of?” Which was initially answered with “uh, chips?” and with some prodding and discussion was ultimately getting shouts of “ones and zeroes” and even, to my delight, “information!” We talked about the difference between hardware and software (and even firmware), what the game needs to be able to calculate, and what kinds of forces are in play during the game. We also talked about the difference between properties and state in relation to the ball, which even led to the difference between linear and angular momentum. It was pretty great. Still a lot of answers from the 8 or so geekier guys (and no guesses from either Sophie), but I gave out about 80 points for lots of good guesses over about 30 minutes of talking, leaving 45 minutes to play.

On the first day, there were few goals because even the easy bots get right after the ball and control the match. So today, we tried 4 vs 4 with no bots and all the kids on the same team; I also added the red and the blue scores so they could get it into either goal. This gave them time to look at the ball and their starting places and see if they could make something happen. After the first two rounds of everybody running all over the place and scoring 3 or 4 goals over 5 minutes, they realized that when their positions get reset after a goal, one of them is usually lined up to bop the ball right into the goal, so the game became figuring out which of the 4 players was lined up, and then letting them shoot it as quickly as possible. The high score was 32, which we added to their question points to determine who advanced to 2 final matches: The Marauders ultimately defeated Team X, while The Blazers fell to The Destroyers.

For tomorrow, I’m hoping to talk a little about how the game produces a 2D image of a 3D simulation, talk about wireframes and textures and 3D modeling, and a little about lighting and special effects; and maybe get the girls to take a couple guesses.

Day 1 was off to a great start! We have the use of Mike’s content studio / classroom with a projector and lots of open space. We set up my 2 PS3s (I’m again thankful that a PlayStation Network purchase usually allows you to download the product onto 5 different units) and 2 of my 15″ travel LCDs with 3 controllers each. We projected the game onto the screen and I went through the tutorials so that all the kids could see the basic moves. Nobody has played this game before (except Nemo) and we have a wider spectrum of game familiarity than I had expected; some self-proclaimed videogame experts who were clearly not all talk, and some kids who sheepishly admitted that they aren’t very good at videogames. I have to admit, I’m shocked to see American elementary schoolers who haven’t ever held a videogame controller and are at a loss when confronted with an analog stick; it’s clear who has anti-game parents. I can’t help but see this as a handicap, but it’s one that they very quickly overcome.

The kids correctly identify what ’supersonic’ means (although the answered first said ‘faster than light, er, sound!) and Nemo chips in by adding that it means that the vehicle should cause a sonic boom. I love that answer, because that’s totally not in the game and Nemo knows it; but he’s applying his knowledge of the world to the question and that’s what it’s all about! The kids also go CRAZY when I mention that you can destroy other cars when you’re supersonic. Nothing like mayhem to inspire an elementary schooler. Lots of oohs and ahhs as the cars do backflips and such; and many helpful suggestions to defeat the tutorials and move on.

We then spent the rest of the class taking turns going 3 on 3 vs. the computer so that everyone could get a few chances to play. While they’re at this, I rethink my approach to taking turns the rest of the week; I think I’ll split them up into teams with all ages on each team to make it fair, and there should be enough time for everybody to get to play at least once each time we meet. During the discussion, I’ll award points to the teams for each good guess or correct answer; I want to get them throwing out ideas and see how much of what goes into 3d software they can deduce on their own. We’ll then add the discussion points to points earned in the battle arena and crown a team victorious each time; and the number of daily wins each team accrues will affect their standing in the final tournament.

Tomorrow will be the first big step; talking about the concepts of 3D Physics and Maths (not doing any equations, just talking about what equations need to be done) to see if we can get them thinking about everything that goes into even simple little games like these!

Stay tuned for a report from day 2!

My kid Nemo is lucky to go to a really great school: Ann Arbor Open School @ Mack. One of my very favorite things they do at Open School is called Focus Studies: three times a year, for 2 weeks, a mini-elective is shoehorned into each day. There are usually 25 or so different Focus Studies to choose from, offered by teachers, staff, and parents. Some are creative, like knitting, building a model, poetry, or writing and staging a play; or there’s a Basketball clinic, a Euchre tournament, a Spanish class, all kinds of stuff. Last year I offered a Focus Study called “Pokémon and Probability” for grades 5-8, and it was a blast. Of course, I learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t, how to engage the kids and keep them focused on some content that’s above grade level. I wrote out lesson plans and everything, but I didn’t keep notes on what happened, so much of what we did was lost to the mists of time. Well, not exactly, but I wanted to blog about it and didn’t, so I’m fixing that this time around.

This year, with the assistance of Eric ‘rhymes with toaster’ Klooster, I’m offering Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-powered Battle Cars: The Focus Study. Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars is a wonderful little game from the Playstation Network that essentially boils down to playing soccer using , well, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars. One thing that I found last year when talking about content that the kids had had essentially no exposure to (like, say, the concept of a spreadsheet!?) was that kids were reluctant to throw out guesses to leading questions if they didn’t know the answer. So, to encourage kids to think and guess, I’m going to award tokens for good guesses or right answers (and artificially spread them around, especially to the little guys) and the kid with the most tokens at the end of the discussion advance to play the game… the idea is to use this game as a framework to talk about things to which kids grades 1-6 aren’t usually exposed. Here’s the basic idea of what we’ll talk about, and I’ll post each night about how it’s going.

Day 1: Overview of Game, What We’ll Cover, How to Play.
Everybody gets a turn, 2v2 and 1v1.

Day 2: Physics and Math: Gravity, Velocity, Momentum, Relative Speed.
2v2 playoffs for top token getters

Day 3: Graphics: 2D and 3D, wireframes, textures, lighting, special effects.
2v2 playoffs for top token getters

Day 4 (ejk): Memory: game code vs. variables, what the game needs to track.
2v2 playoffs for top token getters

Day 5 (ejk): Programming: collision, networking, graphics & physics engines.
2v2 playoffs for top token getters

Day 6: Game Design: Who works on a game, Specifications, Designing for Fun.
Mini-game modes, design your own mini-game

Day 7: Full Tournament for 2-player teams

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.