Category: play

Playing with climate, casually

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I read this story on Canary Media with interest – “Solarpunk is going mainstream. This couple’s $1M Kickstarter proves it. Canary chats with the co-creators of the forthcoming video game Loftia, set in a renewables-powered utopia that celebrates community and climate optimism.”

I think it’s a little bit of a stretch to say that Solarpunk is going mainstream – but “cosycore” meets Animal Crossing x Ghibli aesthetic seems to be attractive. I’ve talked about the ‘protopia’ I call the “Chobani Cinematic Universe” before, and it seems in that vein.

At the end of the article it mentions an existing game, Terra Nil, which is available on Netflix and steam.

I downloaded it and started playing, with headphones in as recommended by the authors.

Terra Nil Game Trailer on YT

Smash cut to… oh, 3 hours later? It had gone midnight and I hadn’t noticed at all.

It’s game mechanics will be fairly familiar to casual gamers – you are tasked with transforming a map by introducing various types of resource in turn, with constraints on your budget to do so. The choices you make encourage different biomes / ecosystems to emerge and flourish. So far so fun.

But I think the sound design is something else.

It is immensely calming. Gentle repetition and seeming evolution in the soundtrack puts one to mind of many ambient favourites of the past, and the eno-esque ‘music as furniture’ feel contributes to your occupation / immersion in making “another green world”.

Ahem.

Anyway.

This put me to thinking about the use of ‘generative music as macroscope’, i.e. using generated soundscapes to create impressionistic understanding of large scale ecologies or systems that you’re embedded in.

Could that connect you more profoundly – or just pleasurably to the energy systems around you?

Or go further to ‘sonify’ natural systems that you’re entangled with (a nod here to Superflux’s recent work giving voice to rivers and watersheds via GenAI…)

Matt Brown made the Carbon Weather Forecast last year and in the past has made some lovely lyrical maps of the shipping forecast, as well as beautiful music-oriented pieces – including Making Future Magic’s soundtrack while we were at BERG.

I imagine he could do something rather wonderful in this arena.

What’s Pokemon Go meets Bloom meets Project Sunroof?

The beginning of BotWorld

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Sad & Hairy, originally uploaded by moleitau.

A while back, two years ago in fact – just under a year before we (BERG) announced Little Printer, Matt Webb gave an excellent talk at the Royal Institution in London called “BotWorld: Designing for the new world of domestic A.I”…

This week, all of the Little Printers that are out in the world started to change.

Their hair started to grow (you can trim it if you like) and they started to get a little sad if they weren’t used as often as they’d like…

IMG_6551

The world of domesticated, tiny AIs that Matt was talking about two years ago is what BERG is starting to explore, manufacture – and sell in every larger numbers.

I poked at it as well, in my talk building on Matt Webb’s thinking “Gardens & Zoos” about a year ago – suggesting that Little Printer was akin to a pot-plant in it’s behaviour, volition and place in our homes.

Little Valentines Printer

Now it is in people’s homes, workplaces, schools – it’s fascinating to see how they relate to it play out everyday.

20 December, 19.23

I’m amazed and proud of the team for a brilliant bit of thinking-through-making-at-scale, which, though it just does very simple things right now, is our platform for playing with the particular corner of the near-future that Matt outlined in his talk.

Leg godt

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Breakfast, Saturday: Pat Kane, Malcolm McCullough

Pat Kane reflects on 10 years of The Play Ethic

The very energies of play – not exclusively our own as a species, but something we uniquely retain right to the end of our lives – shows that we are a radical animal. Play gives us the capacity to flexibly respond to almost any situation that our environment throws at us.

Pat’s thinking and book (and the other thinkers and books it led to) was pretty defining for me over the last half of the decade we’re saying goodbye to this evening. I’m sure the thoughts at the core of his passage above will only become more important in the next ten years.

Thanks Pat.

“He has to make what he is thinking in order to express it.”

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Charles Holland at Fantastic Journal with a brilliant assessment of CE3K and, for that matter – design and material exploration:

“The film is obsessed with issues of representation and non-verbal communication. The famous five-note score that the scientists use to communicate with the aliens, for example, effectively replaces speech. The chief scientist is a Frenchman (played by film director François Truffaut) who makes no more than one or two gnomic utterances and is accompanied throughout the film by an ineffectual translator. The fact that none of the Americans can understand him seems to imbue him with some special understanding of what is going on.

Roy can’t communicate his obsession through conventional language and is forced into non-verbal communication. He has to make what he is thinking in order to express it. And he’s not alone in his obsession. Another character – Gillian Guiler – is also obsessed with Devil’s Tower. She draws it over and over again. In a brilliant scene the two of them converge on Devil’s Tower aware that it’s the location for the alien spaceship’s landing. Trying to work out how to scale the mountain Roy reveals that his knowledge of its topography is vastly superior to Gillian’s. “You should try sculpture next time”, he deadpans.”

The Ambiguity of Play(ce)

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I’m in Wellington, New Zealand at WebStock.

It’s the first session – Jane McGonigal is talking about games, and I start thinking about the less-goal directed, more ambiguous world of play – my twin obsession with place.

I look up Brian Sutton-Smith, who wrote The Ambiguity of Play – probably my favourite book on the subject (which I think I was introduced to by Simon or Pat, or both…) and guess what…

He’s from Wellington.

—-

Update: even crazier – he now lives in Sarasota, Florida – where I went last October…

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He has no words and must design

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Peter Molyneux

Went to the Design London STIR Lecture by Peter Molyneux this evening, and came away disappointed.

Actually, I didn’t have very high hopes in the first place, as I’ve seen Molyneux before, and although he’s certainly passionate, found his charm ran out pretty quickly – but worse, he had little insight to offer.

But the over-riding thought I kept having was that he didn’t have the critical language to describe what he (or more correctly, his teams) had created. He isn’t nearly as literate in why his own games work as the current generation playing his games.

Based on events like EIGF, this seems to be the case, at least amongst Molyneux’s generation of industry veterans. Bedroom-programmers-done-good, pioneers to be sure, but not able to form a critical appreciation of what they are doing or have done beyond the commercial impact.

This is something that reoccurs with every new medium, of course.

The next generation on from them – e.g. Jonathan Smith, Doug Church and of course Greg Costikyan (from whose classic essay on developing such a critical language the title of this post is lifted) are always eloquent, passionate and insightful speakers and spokespeople for their medium.

Unlike Molyneux.

peter molyneux / lionhead / stir lecture
19.11.08

i think i might have heard him do this talk before… this will be far from a transcript…

the constraints of his programming skill led to some of the core mechanics
some of sound effects for populous were created by throwing wet sponges into baths
what did people enjoy? the graphics were not good, the sound effects were awful, and the game play was repetitive: people believed there was more in the game than there was.

“there are only about 8 million gamers tops, and there are 6 billion of everybody, so games for everybody are better to make”

people got obsessed by the “AI” but it is ‘soft, simulational AI, not real AI’ – a sufficently-complex feedback system is seen as an AI.

again people believed there was more in the game (theme park) than there really was.

B&W: the creature -> initially made it humanoid, but realised that the first thing that anyone did was fiddle with the creature’s genitalia… the more humanoid you make something, the less-believable it is (uncanny valley) the closer we got to realism in B&W, the less believable the world became

the creature was prototyped to have desires, which could be satisfied by actions… creates a ‘real’ illusion of mind. Internal needs, wants, motivations – first one we gave the creature was to satisfy it’s hunger.

11pm one night… developer (richard) said “we’re ready to turn on the brain”

allowed the player to play with the mind of the creature – teach…

fable 2: dog (avatar, daemon) learnt from mistakes of B&W creature. Dog has a set of rules in it’s head, much like the asimov robot rules. prime directive: ‘i must not aggravate the player’

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Instorematic update

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Chief Engineer Henry writes:

“Hello there,

We’re doing ok – slowly, but surely. I’ve been continuing to build & test in the evenings and weekends – I’ve built a ‘unit revolution’ of the new helix, using the original framework but with 00 gauge model railway to convey the postcard, which is supported on cardboard and held in place by some natty adjustable brackets which i’ve built from odd bits of plywood and acrylic which was hanging around.

test-build of one revolution of the spiral

Attached are some (in build) pics…
The parts were easy enough to make (especially with my natty new tabletop bandsaw) but I’ve been being extra cautious and testing what happens to the structure over time – I don’t want any of those subtle changes that were frakking things up with the last ‘design’.
The brackets need a little more work, in order to induce controllable camber – I think its a matter of a bolt per bracket, connected to the copper pipe.
customisable camber brackets
That way, I’ll be able to ‘dial in’ the amount of camber needed for each quarter of the helix (at the top, too much camber is a bad thing – it stops the truck because it hasn’t started moving very much, at the bottom you need quite a bit – the truck is moving rather quickly and has a tendancy to fly off – more camber required…)
The next stage is to complete the entire helix – which is a matter of manufacturing more of the same standard parts and slotting them together. The helix can then be tuned and the rest of the layout completed.
So, the carrying postcard should be able to decend via gravity. Hopefully the more finite adjustment of the track will mean that this will work fine…. hopefully.
the postcard carriage
I was giving quite a lot of thought to how the truck would get itself back up to the top – the last meeting with Russell fixed me on having a powered arduino controlled shunter to do the work.
All the other methods seem too complicated in one way or another. The shunter is simplest – it can either be battery powered (with a recharge station at the shop end of the track) or can be powered through the track itself, just like a model railway.
I’m inclined to go for the battery powered option – because then the track doesn’t have to be cleaned (which is a pain in the arse, and will be tricky considering how delicate the track supports will be….)
In *theory* once the helix part is complete, the rest of the track is very easy – about as easy as it was to make that bit of track we built previously. The next complicated part is the postcard pickup, and following that the part that pushes the postcard off the truck at the other end.”
Slow and steady wins the race!
Maybe…
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But it bears repeatin’ now.

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Will Wright from his now legendary Long Now talk with Eno, as quoted by Jim Rossignol in his excellent book “This Gaming Life” (my emphasis below)

“When we do these computer models, those aren’t the real models; the real models are in the gamer’s head. The computer game is just a compiler for that mental model in the player. We have this ability as humans to build these fairly elaborate models in our imaginations, and the process of play is the process of pushing against reality, building a model, refining a model by looking at the results of looking at interacting with things.“

Yep.

That’s still the mission plan.