Jekyll2024-01-29T18:13:58-08:00https://nicklalone.com/feed.xmlNick LaLone, Ph.D.I am a researcher of the socio-technical interested in the relationship between humans and non-humans learning to live with one another.Nick LaLonenick.lalone@gmail.comConsequences of a mobile fetish: logging back in to the virtual world after 10 years afk.2020-03-21T00:00:00-07:002020-03-21T00:00:00-07:00https://nicklalone.com/posts/2020/03/Stalled_and_forgotten<p>With the Coronavirus coming around, so many of us are forced indoors for a time, forced into isolation where digital tools will be forced to become the norm. We’re already seeing things like <a href="https://www.netflixparty.com/">Netflix Party</a> gain immediate popularity or exercise programs like <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7q448/people-are-driving-for-hours-and-paying-hundreds-ring-fit">Ring Fit Adventure</a> sell out suddenly. I was struck by the similarities the pandemic response and social distancing has had to the year following the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/21st-century/9-11-attacks">World Trade Center disaster</a>. We all went inside, purchased a ton of food to make at home, and began to rethink about what was important in life.</p>
<p>Almost all of the reasons I went into academia came out of this time, the period of work between 2001–2009 when the magic of virtual worlds, of virtual life, set the world on fire.</p>
<hr />
<p>A long time ago, I found a blog called <a href="https://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/archives.html">Terra Nova</a> in a google search about <em>Final Fantasy 11 (FFXI)</em>. I was a student in a community college in Austin, Texas playing <em>FFXI</em> and trying to figure out what to do with my life after 9/11 destroyed my dreams of becoming a biblical archaeologist. Trying to make sense of what virtual worlds meant to society seemed to be a tremendously useful project.</p>
<p><img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicklalone/nicklalone.github.io/master/images/tn.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>For years this was the only blog I read, maybe it was the only blog i’ve ever read new posts as they were made.</p>
<p>Yet, as I fought my way through school, all of the promise for this space faltered. The papers slowly disappeared from prestigious journals. We moved on to gamification and mobile devices. Eventually, papers that <a href="https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5ddd/2bc397f451dd3f407cd7b373899555147e83.pdf">lamented the loss of that spark in virtual worlds</a> all but signaled that the study of virtual lives was completely over.</p>
<p>Besides mobile devices, the work that took the place of virtual worlds has been a growing body of literature that not only laments the loss of the social in the virtual, but also signals that much of the promise had <a href="http://blogs.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2010/06/16/lisa-nakamura-dont-hate-the-player-hate-the-game/">completely failed or been corrupted.</a> This item would evolve from studying trolling in games to studying the proliferation of online harassment.</p>
<hr />
<p>So as I continued adding letters to the end and beginning of my name, I evolved with what would become of virtual worlds. I got my PhD in Information Science in 2018 and have been pushing in my career for things like, <a href="http://analoggamestudies.org/2019/09/a-tale-of-dungeons-dragons-and-the-origins-of-the-game-platform/">remembering the past that inspired Dungeons and Dragons</a>, <a href="https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/15635njl164">how digitizing board games shifts the formation and control of networks</a>, and <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3336144">how the history of how we’ve used maps in video games tends to be a lot different from how we use maps normally</a>.</p>
<p>All of these ideas are fueled by a desire to balance 2 things:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>To try to connect those who didn’t like technology to the world that had been created in technology’s wake.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>To try to get folks stuck in the technology-created world to stop seeing themselves as superior and the folks from 1 as backwards.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>It’s no surprise that much of the tension between these two forms the basis of the <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/02/culture-war-liberals-conservatives-trump-2018-222095">culture war</a>.</p>
<p>But at the center of the tension is a growing pressure, a growing fragility that technology represents. We were (are and have been) engineering ourselves into an ever more precarious position culturally, interculturally, interdisciplinarily, and physically. So while I was initially fascinated by the virtual worlds, by the virtual self. What came out of that fascination was an understanding that there was an ever-growing possibility of uncontrollable confusion, collapse, destruction, and disaster. So I moved from trying to understand the remnants of virtual world studies to the study of crisis, disaster, and emergency response.</p>
<p>But that is not a simple leap. In fact, it is somewhat of a juxtaposition, an implied correlation without causation. Yet the evidence of the growing danger can be seen quite clearly over time. I have struggled to find inroads into understanding the relationship. That struggle can be seen in just about everything i’ve written. It often gets suppressed in subtle (less subtle gets rejected) ways because I have to focus my work in the ways academia accepts.</p>
<p>For example, I wrote about <a href="http://analoggamestudies.org/2019/09/a-tale-of-dungeons-dragons-and-the-origins-of-the-game-platform/">remembering the past that inspired D&D,</a> but focused heavily how that past fostered map technology arms races resulting in computation being created by the military. D&D was just a good way to dig into military training and potentially how we came to teach folks how computers worked.</p>
<p>I wrote about how <a href="https://nicklalone.com/publication/2018-07-08-dissertation">digitizing board games influences</a> network formation but the goal was to create new methods to understand how society functions with that technology. This was directly related to the great virtual world experiments I started into academia with and my own struggles to understand Actor-Network Theory as a way to see the world. Specifically, I wondered how to show network creation and the antagonistic tendencies of life.</p>
<p>And finally, I wrote recently about <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3336144">understanding video game maps</a>, but with a goal of finding new possibility spaces for map uses for games like Pokémon Go or for indoor-based mapping technologies for first responders and <a href="https://www.halfwaytothefuture.org/2019/programme/lalone-a-vision-of-augmented-reality-for-urban-search-and-rescue/">search and rescue operations</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/@Nick_Lalone/fostering-historical-research-in-cscw-hci-1ecb362b1df">I keep writing about history, about reconsidering history, and about focusing on the future by understanding that our analyses are history-oriented</a>.</p>
<p>And then the Coronavirus came, we were forced inside, to separate from our physical groups, and suddenly all this old virtual worlds stuff came flooding back.</p>
<hr />
<p>Many of the reasons research on virtual worlds began to float away into obscurity were pretty straight forward. Folks lost interest, <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2008/12/11/terra-nova-blog-slowing-down-as-we-enter-new-era/">lost the magic these games held</a>. Yet, it was something more practical I think. It had to do with who was in control of the games themselves. <a href="https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7br694vk">The user lost control of their community in the virtual world they inhabited</a>. In its place was installed “user experience” engineering meant to tweak every action revenue generating experience that would keep folks playing. This was reflected not only in video games, but in internet-based communities writ large.</p>
<p>I think I can point to a couple other pieces of evidence. It began with a long-winded discussion between a guild in <em>Everquest</em> and <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/everquest-lead-producer-and-designer-brad-mcquaid-has-passed-away/">Brad McQuaid</a>, maker of <em>Everquest</em>. This event has been called “<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/eam0z21sufcn37a/The%20most%20important%20event%20in%20raiding%20history%20-%20full%20-ui%20.pdf?dl=0">The Most Important Event in Raiding History</a>” (snagged from <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20101009211455/http:/elitistjerks.com/blogs/jamesvz/487-most_important_event_raiding_history.html">ElitistJerks</a> long ago) which can best be summarized as the moment in time where the control of in-game life became the provenance of the game creators rather than of the game players. It was a little slow to fully manifest as there was still tremendous benefit to socializing in (then) new games like <a href="http://tuufless.blogspot.com/2006/03/limitbreak-vs-absolute-virtue.html"><em>Final Fantasy 11</em></a> or <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leet-Noobs-Warcraft-Literacies-Epistemologies/dp/1433116103"><em>World of Warcraft</em></a> a few years later. Yet each of these experiences grew stale.</p>
<p>If I were to point at a specific event where things really shifted, I’d probably point to this specific raid.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S_ggLGj37qI" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>This video as the moment in time where <em>WoW</em> began to lose the affordances and features that made it a social game, where the things <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/11/everquest-lead-producer-and-designer-brad-mcquaid-has-passed-away/">McQuaid</a> did finally cemented in one game, with one company at the helm and in control of the market. No longer could I be a weirdo to people in the game world. No longer did I have to labor harshly to achieve fortune and glory. All that was left was to push a button in town and gain experience, repeated from beginning to maximum level. <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/3qbrpofouwg1lsr/LaLone%20-%20FFXI%20Archaeology.pdf?dl=0">This was reflected in other games like FFXI that were left trying to re-create a game made <em>for</em> the virtual world concept into a game for single players to enjoy</a>.</p>
<hr />
<p>And so, with nothing left to do but play a solo game collaboratively, all that was left was to do things like trolling via chat, trolling via finding folks outside of the game, and trolling in an ever escalating, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/14/us/swatting-sentence-casey-viner/index.html">ever more sinister act</a>. In bleeding outside of games, the growth of toxicity was not only inevitable, but predictable. And all we’re left with is trying to figure out how to do <em>something</em> to stop it or to try and reverse it.</p>
<p>But at the core of this is a particularly important problem: academia, technology development, and marketing went from trying to understand and foster the occurrences and trends of this space to something else (it was mobile devices). The loss of this attention allowed the toxic stuff to fester, to grow stronger, and become a contagion in and of itself. So when you see posts like, <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2008/12/11/terra-nova-blog-slowing-down-as-we-enter-new-era/">Terra Nova slowing down</a>, we see the start of a process that became something else. Something sinister.</p>
<p>And so this leads to the <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/gamergate-video-games-five-years-later.html">current situation</a>. And the “new” <a href="https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5beeeee1b9125cd">current situation</a>.</p>
<hr />
<p>We are in the beginning stages of what might be a long-winded, forced separation of people back into their neighborhoods. It will have long-lasting impacts on every culture in the world. Hanging out with neighbors is potentially scary. Hanging out at work is potentially scary. Going to a restaurant is potentially scary. So we’re moving everything online. We’re dusting off the cobwebs of all that virtual worlds stuff.</p>
<p>Yet, we’re dusting it off. We’re actually stuck with the tools that appeared during the heyday of the virtual life. We got video chat, voice chat, video/voice chat, and emojis, so many emojis. We got virtual whiteboards, automatic broadcasts, and huge, far-reaching abilities to share what we see on our screen. Everything we have now is what we had in 2005 but with great fidelity and so many more restrictions, privacy invasions, and monetizations.</p>
<p><img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicklalone/nicklalone.github.io/master/images/cv19.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>We’re currently kicking up a ton of dust.</p>
<p>The dust is that we never actually figured out the potential of the virtual world. Our virtual selves have been scared, hiding in the closet for over a decade now from trolls and trolling. We never figured out how to integrate that virtual self into everyday normal life…only, we did with mobile devices and social media. It too is a weird, scary boogeyman or troll.</p>
<p>Just weeks ago, I sat through another MIT professor saying the same thing as Robert Putnam and Sherry Turkle. It’s “killing” us somehow, it’s “killing what makes us human.” At some point, that thing that was killing us began to have white male faces. That “thing killing us” is (or maybe was) a random angry internet denizen who figured out your address.</p>
<p>And that boogeyman is now manifested as an actual virus. The idea that any of us could be an actual danger to others is so powerful that we’ve begun to horde virus killing soap and wipes. That that fear seems to be transferring to something else, somewhere else. Now that it’s there, can we get back to the integrating our virtual, or non-human, and human selves so we don’t have to be shocked at how bad our options are when the earth reminds us that we just live here?</p>Nick LaLonenick.lalone@gmail.comWith the Coronavirus coming around, so many of us are forced indoors for a time, forced into isolation where digital tools will be forced to become the norm. We’re already seeing things like Netflix Party gain immediate popularity or exercise programs like Ring Fit Adventure sell out suddenly. I was struck by the similarities the pandemic response and social distancing has had to the year following the World Trade Center disaster. We all went inside, purchased a ton of food to make at home, and began to rethink about what was important in life.Fantasy Console Class Semester Wrap-up2018-11-21T00:00:00-08:002018-11-21T00:00:00-08:00https://nicklalone.com/posts/2018/11/Fantasy_Console_Wrapup<p>My first course with PICO-8 as an introductory space for games programming is just about complete. What went right? What went wrong? This post gets into the weeds and explores what I need to change, adjust, and transform.</p>
<h1 id="fantasy-console-class-semester-wrap-up">Fantasy Console Class Semester Wrap-up</h1>
<p>Thanksgiving symbolizes the end of the first semester of my Introduction to Game Programming course using PICO-8.</p>
<p>The course can be found on Github at the link below.
<a href="https://github.com/nicklalone/CIS---102---Getting-Started-with-Video-Game-Development"><strong>nicklalone/CIS—102—Getting-Started-with-Video-Game-Development</strong>
<em>CIS 102 - Getting Started with Video Game Development …</em>github.com</a></p>
<p>What I wanted to do with this course was twofold:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>Write a course that allows students to slowly take apart video games at the programmatic level.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Scaffold the course so that anyone could take the course and succeed.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>I wanted the course to serve as a steward for the complexity of video games. I wanted to use the fantasy console environment so that all aspects of each game could be:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Made tangible.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>But were easily accessible.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>and were easily playable.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Above all, I wanted this to be a very multimedia experience.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>The multimedia experience was important because in addition to teaching programming at a very basic, introductory, and low-pressure way, I also wanted to address computational those skills that every course demands students have but no course actually teaches. These are often called <a href="https://www.thetechedvocate.org/8-essential-digital-literacy-skills-students-need/">basic tech or digital literacy skills</a> but I very much dislike this term.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*bRrJnCK01wwek70zgOpceA.gif" alt="One of the more complex lessons in this course was getting things to interact with each other AND getting them to trigger other game states like loss of a life, game over, and victory. Much of the work I need to do on the course involves these concepts and I think also is central to learning this stuff in general." /><em>One of the more complex lessons in this course was getting things to interact with each other AND getting them to trigger other game states like loss of a life, game over, and victory. Much of the work I need to do on the course involves these concepts and I think also is central to learning this stuff in general.</em></p>
<p>The result of using the term literacy means that not possessing these skills results in being called illiterate. This is not the case as we aren’t referring to something essential to intelligence like reading but the ability to do things like use a computer beyond its intended status as a medium.</p>
<p>The fantasy console allows users to upload games to a code sharing site, record and post .gifs, load from a clipboard, and work across coding environments and various other media simultaneously. I have found that these environments are some of the most well thought out and executed introductory integrated-development environments for coding that just happen to allow their users to see their work compile before them.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*-opsh62LOBqg4F43RrjfyA.png" alt="While this product does an amazing job getting folks into game making, it’s still something on a computer and as a result, you just can’t anticipate what each student’s environment will do to hinder them." /><em>While this product does an amazing job getting folks into game making, it’s still something on a computer and as a result, you just can’t anticipate what each student’s environment will do to hinder them.</em></p>
<h2 id="so-what-went-right">So what went right?</h2>
<p>I based this course off of the amazing work of <a href="https://twitter.com/krystman">Krystian Majewski</a>. His walkthrough of Breakout Hero was a huge inspiration for this course. The big difference between he and I is that i’ve never worked as a coder and my coding skills themselves are not near as high as his. As a result, I am much closer to my students than he could ever be. This is an essential component to teaching introductory programming I think.</p>
<p>In fact, in watching Krystian’s work, I began to think about how to integrate some of the <a href="https://software-carpentry.org/">software carpentry</a> content into what he was doing and providing a lot more scaffolding for the students in the course. While I recommend engaging the <a href="https://software-carpentry.org/">software carpentry</a> website, this video provides a ton of inspiration.</p>
<center><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kmVKGxPlTvc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></center>
<p>That said, Breakout Hero is a fantastic tutorial. The reason I chose this playlist was 2-fold. First, it presents high-level development from origin to completion to release. Second, as you go through the videos, you can see the difficulty result in folks getting frustrated and giving up. The result is that the last video has so few views that you cannot help but feel bad. It is like watching the leaky pipeline in action. This is not the fault of Krystian insomuch as it is the result of the obtuse, inaccessible aspects of programming itself.</p>
<p>Sure, we could all learn to do programming; however, have you ever actually tried to do programming? It often sucks a lot.</p>
<center><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YQzwVDMIfyU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></center>
<p>But it doesn’t have to. In fact, what I wanted to do for this course was to create an environment that increased complexity steadily, but more slowly than normal. It seems to have worked for about 80–90% of the 25 online students I had.</p>
<p>I think my favorite comment I got this semester was (paraphrased):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I felt like I was just given a toolbox and a palette and objectives each week on “The Joy of Programming with Nick Lalone”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And other comments from students at the end of the semester followed the same sort of positivity that I had not expected. The most common response I got in the narrative files students submitted at the end of the semester was, “I never knew how much went into video games! While it is obviously more complex than what i’m doing, I can see how it all fits together!”</p>
<p>And that realization in addition to the increased exposure to the games people have made was incredible. Multimedia use increased exponentially for each student. Additionally, I asked them to upload games to the <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7#sub=2&mode=carts">lexaloffle carts page</a>. Because the community there is so welcoming and helpful, many of my students found answers to questions from folks commenting on the games themselves.</p>
<p>All in all, it was so satisfying to see this collection of exercises welcomed with so much enthusiasm. But it was not all good.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*QIVqZJ0BrDyMnlUyrnolFA.gif" alt="No matter how much you try, someone always jumps into a missile…" /><em>No matter how much you try, someone always jumps into a missile…</em></p>
<h2 id="so-what-went-wrong">So what went wrong?</h2>
<p>One of the issues with teaching programming is that we’re very bad at it. While there are significant resources out there, they all presume those “tech literacy” skills. I think the thing that frustrates me the most is that so many introductory course on programming assumes from the outset that students are at a level that is neither introductory nor would be in the course.</p>
<p>While this seems obvious, it is a frustrating blind spot for faculty who have been engaged in computation at high levels for so long that they cannot remember how they even began to get there. I am no exception to this despite not being a professional coder.</p>
<p>While I tried to approach this space as though the student had never considered programming at all, there were some things that I did not consider. I also did not anticipate outside influences.</p>
<h3 id="anti-virus-software">Anti-virus software</h3>
<p>PICO-8 is an extremely small program that requires very few resources. It is so small and light and simple that it is only 11.4 megabytes. It can be loaded on all sorts of devices and have even started to see folks try to export it all to floppy discs and Commodore 64. But it is this lightness that can provide something difficult for folks who are not used to working with computers.</p>
<p>Throughout the semester, around a quarter of the students emailed me in a panic about PICO-8 getting uninstalled and quarantined by their anti-virus software. There isn’t much that I can do about this other than to tell them to either add an exception or uninstall the anti-virus software itself. Interestingly, those same students did not know how to do either of these things.</p>
<p>This has lead me to start trying to outline a video on common problems and ways to solve them.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*TXS7PQGiLvOQi7UTnj9cIA.gif" alt="How to deal with this in a course not about this without being able to see the machine, the student, or the issue. How to triage a student’s problem with a computer when the computer is needed to communicate?" /><em>How to deal with this in a course not about this without being able to see the machine, the student, or the issue. How to triage a student’s problem with a computer when the computer is needed to communicate?</em></p>
<h3 id="collisions">Collisions</h3>
<p>The most difficult aspect of coding is getting two objects to interact with one another. In Krystian’s tutorials, he spreads this out amongst 3 obtuse and difficult videos that cover nearly 2 hours of video. If you dig in to other video tutorials, they glaze over this point saying things like, “Just do this, simple!” And it makes sense because this is the single most difficult aspect of coding like this that I can think of.</p>
<p>When I sat down to do record my own version of this, I started to outline the code and video I was going to make and it was probably going to be over an hour. I tried to make many of the tutorial aspects of my videos less than 30 minutes each. So, when I started to record these videos it took me probably more than 3 or 4 hours to really get it all right.</p>
<p>I ended up adjusting the entire structure of the course so that I could spread collisions out between 2 different weeks. This resulted in pushing “game states” into a seemingly throw away video which then started to cascade failures across almost every student’s game.</p>
<p>The correction for this is simple though as I changed the content in a live course. Future students will not see those changes. Instead, the content will be set up that way and shouldn’t provide any issues.</p>
<h3 id="the-problem-of-growing-programs">The Problem of Growing Programs</h3>
<p>The general path of this course is to:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>introduce variables,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>create a ball,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>move the ball,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>create edges to bounce the ball off of,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>create a paddle,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>move the paddle,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>get the paddle and ball to react to one another,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>get the paddle and ball to bounce off each other,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>add game states like victory and loss,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>add sound,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>add levels,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Juice it up!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Polish and submit.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>By around the introduction of game states, it is no longer possible for students to ask the question, “This doesn’t work, can you help me?” The games are now so long that it will take a lot longer to debug the game than the time any professor will have.</p>
<p>This results in a bit of frustration when those students ask for help by saying, “It’s broken” but not getting any help because no person, no matter how helpful they are, can actually help them. It is such a frustrating problem that I have been considering altering the “juicing” content to “how to ask technical questions” or something like that.</p>
<h3 id="what-to-change">What to Change?</h3>
<p>There is a lot to change. Generally, I want to add 3 distinct modes for students to declare at the start of the course:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>**Normal Mode: **An introductory path where students take the code of the course and comment each line so they get used to reading code.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>**Difficult Mode: **The way the course is now where students make Breakout! and then are given a choice to make something else.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>**Expert Mode: **An expert path where students make their own content with high stakes grading.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>But I am hesitant about this. My hesitation stems from putting folks who have had previous programming training on display. What might work there then is asking **Expert Mode **students to submit their content to the faculty member directly.</p>
<p>This has the benefit of keeping the expert content away from the new students while also making the <strong>Expert Mode **students feel like they have a more direct line to faculty of record. For **Normal</strong> and **Difficult **mode students, I think there shouldn’t be too much difficulty with those humans to interact with each other. Additionally, I think i’d offer that while students cannot move down in difficulty, they can decide to move up.</p>
<p>But ultimately, I wonder if it’s worth the hassle. I think I need more data. There is always a need for more data!</p>
<p>Given all of this, I wonder about what the next course could be. I have found myself wondering about:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Teaching game design concepts.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Teaching game design philosophies.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Teaching more advanced programming methods.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Ultimately merging those concepts in some way.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>To date, I don’t know that i’ve seen a curriculum that does this. Instead, I see some interesting intro courses that eventually get impatient or need to catch up to some sort of programmer’s ability later in the program and so that careful scaffolding is suddenly moved away by an Angry Bird with little to no empathy about how precarious the situation truly is.</p>Nick LaLonenick.lalone@gmail.comMy first course with PICO-8 as an introductory space for games programming is just about complete. What went right? What went wrong? This post gets into the weeds and explores what I need to change, adjust, and transform.A Meaningful Play After Action Report2018-10-21T00:00:00-07:002018-10-21T00:00:00-07:00https://nicklalone.com/posts/2018/10/after_action<p>My relationship with games and game studies is often one of curiosity. I find the concept of ‘play’ useful yet I find that ‘play’ is more useful to study something else than it is to study games themselves. Despite this, I do try to keep an eye on games and game studies. There is always so much stuff to watch, so many authors to keep track of, and so many academic moves to remember.</p>
<h1 id="a-meaningful-play-after-action-report">A Meaningful Play After Action Report</h1>
<p>Seriously Not Serious Yet Mainstream</p>
<p>Meaningful Play is a conference that occurs every 2 years in East Lansing Michigan. At this conference will typically be a cross-section of a number of different types of game scholars resulting in a pretty interesting spectrum of researchers from different spaces, academic settings, and industry. In conjunction with those researchers are students working on games themselves as well as other, independent game creators.</p>
<p>All in all, it is a great conference. It is small enough to be intimate yet prestigious enough to offer an opportunity to meet high quality researchers and industry professionals.</p>
<p>I wanted to write up a brief collection of thoughts based on the 3 separate sessions I attended. Within each of these, I thought i’d offer a few other ideas from the keynotes, lunches, and other meetings.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*3wOGaIvAEM4E6DCpRKizww.jpeg" alt="Master Thieves provides a vehicle through which students can experience a kind of play typically unavailable in most modern games." /><em>Master Thieves provides a vehicle through which students can experience a kind of play typically unavailable in most modern games.</em></p>
<h3 id="session-1--teaching-game-development-to-different-types-of-students">Session 1 — <a href="http://meaningfulplay.msu.edu/program.php?session=111">Teaching Game Development to Different Types of Students</a></h3>
<p>I recently began to teach social scientists and various kinds of non-technical students how programming works. This is no easy task and it has provided an unusually fruitful series of lectures, demonstrations, and writings that will probably influence my understanding of technical concepts for quite some time.</p>
<p>At Meaningful Play, there was a session about teaching something equally problematic to those interested in it — game design. Now, the act of thinking ludically or playfully is difficult. After all, to think in terms of play is to think outside of the basic human activity. To do so AND apply it is even more difficult.</p>
<p>I liked the notes from that session. They are located here: <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UDcp2pZervfPQpLGv_x9X7SaONoat0mTh83ztC3HqNo/edit?usp=sharing">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UDcp2pZervfPQpLGv_x9X7SaONoat0mTh83ztC3HqNo/edit?usp=sharing</a></p>
<p>In the session, I began to witness a sort of unopened box in the form of this idea that we learn how play and game design works by learning computer programming. Or, in another way, we learn how computer programming works through actively designing a game.</p>
<p>There seemed to be a lot of frustration around this concept and a lot of interest in scaffolding. I wondered about the sort of forcing together of two very different ideas. We force students to learn programming and design simultaneously.</p>
<p>The problem with this — at least in my view — is that in both respects, much of the act of programming OR of design is truncated and moved to the background. Without concentrating on one or the other, both are forced into disparate spaces without much light or effort afforded them.</p>
<p>In addition, we provide a learning experience that is open and ultimately the opposite of what we want students to do. In this <em>unplayful</em> space, students will inevitably end up with are strangely shallow games that adhere so loosely to the idea of games and game design that it probably wasn’t worth it.</p>
<p>I left the session a little bewildered but resolute that I was going down the right road. In order to learn to design, we must first learn how games themselves function. In order to do that, we need to learn in an extremely limited space. In order to engage a limited space, we need to remove almost all aspects of design or decision from the act of programming.</p>
<p>In the past few months, i’ve written about PICO-8 and my experiments there. I happened upon a particularly interesting phenomenon. If I simply allowed my students to see the code I expected them to write and if I asked them to comment each line of code and what it was doing, that I could ask them to rewrite, using that code, a number of Frankenstein cartridges. In essence, by providing them no goals and no resources through which they could design something on their own, I could retroactively allow them to take these little programming blocks and rewrite them in a way that would allow them to make sense of what was happening.</p>
<p>I want to call this something like, “exploration of pencils in computer languages.”</p>
<p>Once the pencil is understood, then we can start experimenting more with them. We can start using new techniques and ideas about pencils. We can do more design. This needs to be developed further.</p>
<h3 id="session-2--serious-play-on-twitch-experiments-in-academic-streaming">Session 2 — <a href="http://meaningfulplay.msu.edu/program.php?session=112">Serious Play on Twitch: Experiments in Academic Streaming</a></h3>
<p>The second session I attended had to do with streaming academia. A while back when I was in the midst of the hellscape that was my dissertation, I noticed someone was streaming their daily writing routine. In response, I started to do this as well. It felt good trying to share the loneliness of the academic mode. Additionally, the community of folks surrounding the writing portions of Twitch.tv afforded me a small ability to connect some of my work to that of others.</p>
<p>In this session, the Wisconsin cadre from <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/serious_play">https://www.twitch.tv/serious_play</a> or the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Anthropology program discussed the various aspects of their work surrounding their trying to make their work more public.</p>
<p>I took out of this session that through the often closed, piecemeal aspects of university ICT infrastructure can be difficult to deal with. And it is true that many of the ports, digital rights, and other aspects of academic life do not really ever get highlighted.</p>
<p>Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this was the Serious Play channel reaching affiliate status (thus allowing ad revenue) and the resulting ethical dilemma of where that money should go. The intersection of monetary gain in the academy versus the current generation of funding through new-economy means certainly highlights that much of the structure of payment for academia has not caught up to new ways of making money.</p>
<p>This made me consider, or perhaps re-consider Nick Mizer’s work on Kickstarter, Academics with Patreons, and other ways that academics have sought funding for their projects. Indeed, can an IRB rectify the needs of privacy and study if I as a kickstarter or patreon account will be broadcasting my research, broadcasting my writing?</p>
<p>This session was an excellent catalyst for further thought and I hope to see it in New Media and Society soon.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*p-xTPKJyLs9Hn8yZANJifA.jpeg" alt="This 2-player game called RESISTOR_ allows 2-players to try and connect wires and paths to one another. It is a unique game because i’m playing with the front of the cards I have but also the backs of the cards of the other player. It uses memory in ways I haven’t seen before." /><em>This 2-player game called RESISTOR_ allows 2-players to try and connect wires and paths to one another. It is a unique game because i’m playing with the front of the cards I have but also the backs of the cards of the other player. It uses memory in ways I haven’t seen before.</em></p>
<h3 id="session-3--cooperative-play">Session 3 — <a href="http://meaningfulplay.msu.edu/program.php?session=101">Cooperative Play</a></h3>
<p>The last session was my own. At the last minute, I decided to throw something together about the sociality of MMORPGs. I absolutely adore the work of Nikki Crenshaw and so should you:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=zmRH6E0AAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=zmRH6E0AAAAJ:eflP2zaiRacC">“ Something We Loved That Was Taken Away”: Community and Neoliberalism in World of Warcraft</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=zmRH6E0AAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=zmRH6E0AAAAJ:D_sINldO8mEC">Social Experience in World of Warcraft: Technological and Ideological Mediations</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=zmRH6E0AAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=zmRH6E0AAAAJ:UeHWp8X0CEIC">“ It Was More Than Just the Game, It Was the Community”: Social Affordances in Online Games</a></p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Each of these papers get at a very specific idea — World of Warcraft doesn’t afford for sociality much these days.</p>
<p>My plan of attack for this was to look at Final Fantasy 11 and see if it had followed the same trajectory. After all, if we can see this loss of sociality elsewhere in video games, could this be something that contributed to the rise of toxicity and a general loss of the social contract in the digital spaces?</p>
<p>My slides are here: <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/u364ra0qujw3vl8/ffxi%20archaeology.pdf?dl=0">https://www.dropbox.com/s/u364ra0qujw3vl8/ffxi%20archaeology.pdf?dl=0</a></p>
<p>The other presentations in this particular meeting were also strong but also fell in to the way that MMO research used to be. All in all, I don’t know how well we really captured “cooperative play” or if we really unpacked it at all.</p>
<h3 id="final-thoughts">Final Thoughts</h3>
<p>Overall, I had a lot of fun with the conference. It helped me think about things I haven’t thought about in a while using new knowledge that i’ve gained over time. I tweeted that:</p>
<iframe src="https://medium.com/media/690bdddaf2f4bbf5f7579a55507cd9f0" frameborder="0"></iframe>
<p>Two things here have stuck with me. I see so many games in the serious play spaces that are trying to replicate some tiny aspect of a AAA game. There are so many ways that we can use computers to do things but we ultimately settle on these uber popular things because…I guess it’s easier to think about?</p>
<p>I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of “well played” and how it relates to everything i’ve talked about here. I think that if we can actually separate design and computer science aspects of design that the concept of well-played itself can be explored.</p>
<p>But what constitutes well-played? Is it simply playing non-popular games? I think as a steward of games, faculty owe it to their students to provide them with ample ideas of what the pencils and brushes we teach students to use can do. The idea of well-played is little different than that of the well-read writer. We can’t learn to make games without experiencing life and without experiencing life, we could rely on experiencing life through other games. Is it enough to just curate a list of games students *should *play?</p>
<p>Something to consider.</p>Nick LaLonenick.lalone@gmail.comMy relationship with games and game studies is often one of curiosity. I find the concept of ‘play’ useful yet I find that ‘play’ is more useful to study something else than it is to study games themselves. Despite this, I do try to keep an eye on games and game studies. There is always so much stuff to watch, so many authors to keep track of, and so many academic moves to remember.First Steps with PICO-82018-08-20T00:00:00-07:002018-08-20T00:00:00-07:00https://nicklalone.com/posts/2018/08/First_Steps<p>What is code? Why do we write it in PICO-8? What does that mean?</p>
<h3 id="before-getting-there-some-context">Before getting there, some context</h3>
<p>One semester when I was new to teaching, I was asked at the last minute to teach an introductory HTML/CSS course for graphic designers. While the content of the course was set, I approached the course with an expectation that students would know or at least know how to look up 2 specific things. First, I expected students would know the basics of how the Internet worked and second, I expected that students would know what HTML and CSS files were and were for. How wrong I was is the basis of this piece which is meant for an, “aside” in a course i’m currently writing.</p>
<p>Over the years, I have discussed this disaster with others. The strongest point I’ve seen is one that a mentor made who suggested that in basic programming, we often begin with tiny steps like “Hello World” or “Calculate 2+2.” After that hand-shake and brief intro, students are then slowly introduced all manner of concepts: variables, arrays, IF, Functions, etc. It isn’t perfect but organizations like <a href="https://software-carpentry.org/">software carpentry</a>, we can see efforts to stabilize it, routinize it, make it more friendly.</p>
<p>Each step of learning how to program is more complex but always (at least hopefully always) connected to the previous content in both context and practice. In HTML/CSS courses, the curriculum often demands more than, “hello world.” In fact, as I sought answers to how to make that course make more sense, the project I saw the most (in an intro course) was: “Make a portfolio using your knowledge of graphic design.” Students in both sets though are not taught how to write, where to write, or why we write HTML/CSS. Yet, in those courses we tend to grade implementation and design. There’s a tremendous gap here and I believe it carries over to video games as well.</p>
<p>For example, a lot of students I have met seem to fall under this spell, faculty do as well. “You have been playing games that cost billions to make, let’s learn how to make those!” This is without providing knowledge of computers, programming, programming teams, or how all of those interact. Perhaps this is a bit hyperbolic but it’s a lot more common than it should be. I have been thinking more about the industry that was created throughout the course of my childhood. Video games began with little memory, little capability, and little more than a collection of dots drawn on a screen just as a beam of light was shot across a screen. If we’re teaching design, it should begin here.</p>
<p>This has lead to me to consider learning to program as an historical process. In the world of video games and video gaming, this process should not be through <a href="https://unity3d.com/learn/get-started">Unity</a> or <a href="https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/what-is-unreal-engine-4">Unreal Engine</a>. It should not be through learning any of the <a href="https://handmadehero.org/">C languages</a>, action script, or even the maker programs. It should be done in a space that resembles a world where the first video games were made.</p>
<p>But we can never go back to that space. Instead, we have to rely on new interpretations of the past. We have to consider something like Shovel Night or any of the Retro-games out there. <a href="http://yachtclubgames.com/2014/07/breaking-the-nes/">As this article notes: “What if development of the NES never stopped?</a>” Or for that matter, what if the Atari, the Amiga, the Commodore 64, or the Intellivision were still active consoles? Would we teach to make games with the AAA experiences we have now or would we instead begin with these early consoles? This is where <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php">PICO-8</a> sits for me. It is a perfect vehicle to start a ride into design that does not skip history, it celebrates it.</p>
<p>It’s great to think about starting with <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php">PICO-8</a> as a way to talk about the history of games in both application and practice, but there’s still more to consider. We know <em>a lot</em> more now about educating programmers and designers than we ever have.</p>
<p>I think still of that HTML/CSS course. I want to learn from the mistakes of that course. From there, and from educators like <a href="http://third-bit.com/">Greg Wilson</a>, I think it is safe to say that there initial barriers to learning how to program. These are very necessary pieces of knowledge that no one ever actually tells anyone. I’d suggest that there are two questions that could cover it.</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>What is code?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Where does coding occur and why?</p>
</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="what-is-code">What is code?</h3>
<p>The easiest way to describe computer code is through the concept of levels. At the very bottom level there is the language of the machine. We most often see this represented as a series of 1’s and 0’s. These 1’s and 0’s are in patterns so that the machines that make up the computer perform certain activities. There are languages above this that are still considered low level but this is the basics of it.</p>
<p>Above the low level languages are, of course, high level languages. These languages look like those that we see all the time on tv shows and on accident when a program fails or when we hit certain buttons on accident. The picture below should help to represent those things.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*9Oc8cULfr3yR61H5Nm_Hgw.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>There is a sub-question to the above though, “how does it get from the high level to the lower levels?” Well, as the code moves from high to low, it is interpreted and translated then sent on to the next level until it gets to the machine level and is carried out. This is related to the second question.</p>
<h3 id="where-does-coding-occur-and-why">Where does coding occur and why?</h3>
<p>This will begin with a lengthy, “Why” first.</p>
<p>At the high level, languages exist that are formalized and structured by committee that is enforced by “releases.” This is why you’ll hear about “HTML 5” or “Python 3.7.” Those numbers mark that a language has changed and these languages are ones you might have heard of before like the <a href="https://handmadehero.org/">C languages (C, C+, C#, etc)</a>, Python, <a href="https://www.openprocessing.org/">Processing</a>, Java, or even the <a href="https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/markup_language.html">markup languages</a> like HTML and CSS. These are the language that we “program” in as they contain commands written in languages meant for humans to learn, to write, and to design with. These languages are created in such a way that there is something interpreting and translating the code from what humans create to what machines need to function. We’ll talk more about this later. But first, why do we create that “high level” code?</p>
<p>We create code inside of a program. In our case, we’ll be working with <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php">PICO-8</a>. This program is where we will create code because it contains two specific things: 1). an unformatted space to write in, and 2). a way to run the code. Code is almost always unformatted. This means that it contains only the letters, lines, and line breaks that is bereft of any formatting like bold, italics, or other concepts. You cannot write code in so-called, “rich text” programs.</p>
<p>This means that code cannot be created in Microsoft Word files or inside of a file on any word processor. These files have all sorts of extra data associated with them, data like font, text formatting, and other things like pictures. These are called, “rich text” files. You will be working in <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php">PICO-8</a> which creates unformatted text files with the extension, .p8.</p>
<p>While they are called, .p8, these files are also plain text files. (these are often noted as, “.txt”) These files contain only 2 things: line breaks and spacing. We will be using <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php">PICO-8</a> to create and run those files but you can also create them in programs like:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="https://www.sublimetext.com/">Sublime Text</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://notepad-plus-plus.org/">Notepad++</a></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="https://atom.io/">Atom</a></p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>and as long as the file is called, “yourgamenamehere.p8” it can at least be loaded inside of <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php">PICO-8</a>. But why is it called this? What does all this mean?</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*YcsfYOdPaSJqDYhrH4cimw.jpeg" alt="" /></p>
<p>Well, let’s start from the above picture. At the very top are some programming languages. <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php">PICO-8</a>’s language is a form of another programming language called <a href="http://pico-8.wikia.com/wiki/Lua">LUA</a>. It, like FORTRAN, C, and PASCAL are all high-level languages. You write programs in the language you need and then you run it through an interpreter or it is compiled. So what converts a language, or translates it, to the lower levels?</p>
<p>For <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php">PICO-8</a>, the language you write, the commands, the .p8 files you write is interpreted and translated and sent toward machine language and eventually the hardware (eventually being nearly instantaneously). This means that the words and commands you write, once you hit run, are sent to an interpreter. The interpreter takes those commands and translates them into assembly language, and then so on and so forth down into the hardware. As that language is interpreted, you can see results. <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php">PICO-8</a> contains a translator, Lua’s interpreter, and so as your .p8 file is run, each line is sent to the translator and placed in memory if need be.</p>
<p>This is why computer code is so difficult at first. You need to know precisely (or at least mostly) how to write your code to get the result you want. Computer languages, especially machine languages, are rigid and very structured. None of these lines of codes can contain *any errors. *If they do, either the interpreter stops translating or compiling stops or you end up with an error. Sometimes the program works but “<a href="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9fiSyC2RGwY/maxresdefault.jpg">unpredictably</a>.” But how often is code sent to the translator? This depends but in <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php">PICO-8</a>, we know exactly how often.</p>
<p>In this class, you’ll hear about “LOOPS,” specifically the <a href="https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/articles/gamedev-glossary-what-is-the-game-loop--gamedev-2469">game loop</a>. What this means is that you are sending a certain block of code (usually noted by the names: <a href="http://pico-8.wikia.com/wiki/GameLoop">_init, _update, _draw</a>) to the interpreter for every frame the game is sending. So when you hear the term 30FPS or 60FPS, it means that once every second, that block of code has been sent to the interpreter, translated, and run by the hardware 30 times or 60 times. As you’ll see in the rest of the course, because your object’s positions, color, or animation logic changes, the player sees a dynamic game in front of them. We’ll unpack this a lot more as the class continues.</p>
<p>So now you have some basics as well as some context from where those basics come from:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>What is code? Well, it’s unformatted text in a file marked with an extension associated with the program you’re using to run it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Where does coding occur and why? It occurs inside of <a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php">PICO-8</a> which looks at .p8 files and interprets it, translating the code in the file to machine languages 30 or 60 times each second.</p>
</li>
</ol>Nick LaLonenick.lalone@gmail.comWhat is code? Why do we write it in PICO-8? What does that mean?All These Gandalfs2018-08-08T00:00:00-07:002018-08-08T00:00:00-07:00https://nicklalone.com/posts/2018/08/All_These_Gandalfs<p>Or how we all want to stay home instead of go on adventures. I wrote this introductory bit for my dissertation and i’m not sure it will stick with it so I thought i’d put it here.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*_ZCtIgV2PFqN2gv4kd_myQ.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>I think a lot about the book The Hobbit (1937). I think about this book because it centers on a stubborn, not-so-young guy having his life toppled by someone who knew more about the world than he did. Bilbo Baggins is settling into a life in the place he was born much like like all of the other people in his village. Unbeknownst to him, some immortal academic angel from far off places named Gandalf decides that he needs usurp his life give him a new one. This new life would be filled with adventure, danger, mystery, magic, elves, goblins, dragons, and dwarves because Gandalf had an idea that the world would probably need Bilbo for something. For many of us, we want to be Bilbo before he met Gandalf. Adventure is uncomfortable because adventure changes us and in changing us, the world itself changes. Yet the world needs us, our perspective, and we need to hear from all those elves, goblins, dragons and dwarves.</p>
<p>There are endless Gandalfs who seek to destabilize normalcy so that we may correct some far off wrong many of us have never considered. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about the <a href="https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html">white moderate</a> who just wants things to stay the way they are. The writers of the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, and countless other declarations of war, peace, surrender, marriage, divorce, death, and life all center on some act that threatens to disrupt us at our most comfortable. The fear of change and discomfort keeps us from looking out at the world these Gandalfs see.</p>
<p>I think about these things not because I want to be a Gandalf. I do not seek to create some incredible change in the world. Instead, I think about them because of all those things the Gandalfs have done, nearly all of them have ended back in that space of peace and steady, predictable living. Humans do not change that often, if at all. One of the most poignant aspects of my upbringing as a Sociologist was coming upon this quote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“If one compares our culture with that of a hundred years ago, then one may surely say — subject to many individual exceptions — that the things that determine and surround our lives, such as tools, means of transport, the products of science, technology and art, are extremely refined. Yet individual culture, at least in the higher strata, has not progressed at all to the same extent; indeed, it has even frequently declined. This does not need to be shown in detail” George Simmel — <em>The Philosophy of Money</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I have thought about this quote every day since I read it in 2004. Fourteen years later, I have begun to understand how and why we need to fight against becoming pre-Gandalf Bilbo Baggins. Instead, we need to emulate Gandalf by tricking someone into action and hoping for the best. I set out to write this dissertation as Bilbo while my adviser — Gandalf that she is — hoped for the best.</p>
<p>I myself had been tricked into a PhD program with the promise of education, of possibility, and perhaps some treasure. Though, in academia’s case treasure is not usually gold but the knowledge we find along the way. As I have gone on my adventure, I saw Dwarves, their quests, and these wise beings all discussing the world. Yet much like Bilbo, each aspect of my journey was bounded by metaphorical and literal boundaries. I am neither dwarf nor an adventurer.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*h7UIfMleDEzcMLq6ZCVZaA.jpeg" alt="" /></p>
<p>The College of Information Sciences and Technology that I enrolled in is a physical building that is separated from nearly all the rest of campus save a few tragic fraternity houses. I have never spoken to a Chemistry Professor. I have never spoken to a physics faculty member. In fact, aside from my desire to play board games, I would never have met anyone except people who quibbled over the social life of information. Academia as a whole is filled with endless Bilbos who have not met Gandalf. In many ways, we socialize into a group, into a discipline, into a way of thinking. And there we stay, under the hill in our borders in countless meetings, second breakfasts, and banquets at conferences. But there are other beings other than humans, we create them every day and often forget about them.</p>
<p>Designed objects like information communication technologies tend to serve as boundary maintainers. As boundary maintenance devices, these technologies perform duties that are assigned by other humans. They do little other than what humans have been doing themselves. Yet because these technologies maintain memory, what they do ends up shocking us. It is in shocking us that we seek the comfort under the hill. This has consequences as technology is often blamed for creating the problems that technology points out about us. The problems of the world then become the problems of technology. We hoist our collective problems onto technology while simultaneously robbing technology of its creator. I began to think about my dissertation research from this point of origin.</p>
<p>When I was a new PhD student, I was shocked at how little humans were considered by designers of socio-technical systems at the iSchool I enrolled in. I was equally shocked by how little the space I came from considered technology. These two acts of ignoring the other point to a space that needs to be adventured in. It is a space filled with invisible objects that are constantly tempered by an equally invisible desire for predictable normalcy. Technology is consistently easier to use, easier to understand, and more narrowly focused on specific tasks. Technology, much like fashion, has come to identify others as belonging to our space.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*7pVDZBcyqa8R5Z-dQdsr_w.jpeg" alt="" /></p>
<p>But something else is happening as boundaries become more well-defined. They are also becoming more fragile. It would seem that Simmel’s quote is starting to break down. It would seem that instead of needing endless Gandalfs to push us along, we are starting to push ourselves to change. Human beings are changing and we are changing because the objects we use, the technologies we create, are themselves becoming integrated with society in a way that has not been accomplished before. It is a stupendous occurrence with consequences we cannot yet comprehend. We cannot comprehend that change because while technology is new, we still study technology use with the same techniques that we have used for hundreds of years.</p>
<p>This realization came at the mid-point of the development of this dissertation. I was not going to simply perform a test to show all of these things. I was not going to ask a question and then seek an answer. Instead, I was going to develop some way of thinking about technology, of asking questions of technology, that did not rely on centuries old assumptions about the makeup of society. It was at this point, that I rejected that quote of Simmel. In doing so, I found that I was free to consider use from mico- meso- or macro- levels simultaneously. It was just a matter of finding the right objects to observe and the right way to consider them.</p>Nick LaLonenick.lalone@gmail.comOr how we all want to stay home instead of go on adventures. I wrote this introductory bit for my dissertation and i’m not sure it will stick with it so I thought i’d put it here.Are Fantasy Consoles a Better Gateway to Learning How to Program? Learning Programming with PICO-82018-08-08T00:00:00-07:002018-08-08T00:00:00-07:00https://nicklalone.com/posts/2018/08/Are_Fantasy_Consoles<p>Fantasy Consoles are self-contained video game development environments so incredibly constrained that users have no choice but to learn how programming works.</p>
<p>I was once told that programming is the act of shifting around the limitations of resources, language, talent, or knowledge to provide a vehicle for users to do the same. I have thought about this a lot as I have begun to teach introductory programming and information processing. Teaching programming to those who are curious but apprehensive of actually doing it is perhaps one of the most difficult and consumptive challenges I have ever faced. I love it.</p>
<p>A few years ago, I inherited a game design program and found myself suddenly teaching everything from introductory courses on using Unity to the principles of game design. One of the things that struck me was just how difficult it was for students to learn two seemingly similar yet exceedingly disparate skills — programming games and designing games.</p>
<p>For the later, there are tools to design games that take the pressure of programming and try to sweep it under a rug. However, these tools still require an excess of programmatic thinking beyond anything most people will know. For programming, there are endless tutorials and endless approaches that force students to dig deeply into the act of programming. Much like that of <a href="https://www.wired.com/2017/04/hey-computer-scientists-stop-hating-humanities/">invisible algorithmic biases</a> or the lack of sociological imagination in computer scientists, game designers seem to fall into the same categories — designers or programmers. <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/z2nc86mxc5p72j4/LaLone%20-%20Dissertation%20Draft%20-%20Submission%20-%20final.pdf?dl=0">This is where I have tried to situate myself</a> as an information scientist and scientist of the socio-technical: inside the spaces on a line between these two asymptotic curves.</p>
<p>What I want for an introductory programming class is a product that gets as close to intersecting with these two spheres as possible. This product needs to be able to do the following things:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>Be contained inside of a small, lightweight, easy to understand piece of software.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Contain a simple, yet comprehensive interface .</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Be welcoming to newcomers and more practiced programmers.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Be easy to use yet difficult to master with these two concepts codified and gamified.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Be reactive and display progress immediately without lengthy compile times.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>There are several products that approach this type of environment but I want to focus on 2 specifically. Originally, I flirted with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processing_(programming_language)">processing programming language</a>. This language is really quite amazing in a way that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(robot)">turtles</a> are amazing. It is self-contained inside of a nicely designed <a href="https://processing.org/download/">piece of software</a>. It also has some amazing <a href="https://www.openprocessing.org/">community-oriented websites</a>. There are also some <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/watz/sets/72157616153554806/">incredibly beautiful visualizations</a> that have used processing. It is small, lightweight, reactive, and is built around the idea of education with tie-ins to multiple languages such as Java and <a href="https://py.processing.org/">Python</a>. It is an educational tool that can be used to jump into those languages.</p>
<iframe src="https://medium.com/media/10808921375aaac70c43a9a64baad8e8" frameborder="0"></iframe>
<p>But yet, processing, the way it is built, the way it is documented, and the way the community functions resembles expert-level programmer-communities. While a teacher or mentor can help walk interested and curious people through the language, the community, the tools, the books, and everything else it stands in complete resemblance of the very thing that keeps interested new programmers from taking the plunge. Finally, while processing is neat for visualizing concepts in programming, it is meant to produce programs, produce visualizations, and more. In essence, it is not limited enough to aid new programmers.</p>
<p>Python, Java, Javascript, even HTML and CSS all provide these same hurdles and this same issues of being, “out of balance.” We can produce programmers quickly but these programmers will rarely have the complete set of skills to actually help balance the equation created when <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262028506/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1">computation developed over the course of the two World Wars</a>. So I set out to re-consider a new approach and came upon a set of products that seem to exist within the factors I outlined above — they are called Fantasy Consoles.</p>
<h3 id="what-is-a-fantasy-console">What is a fantasy console?</h3>
<p>Fantasy Consoles are self-contained video game hardware in the vein of the current retro-craze in video gaming. <a href="https://medium.com/@G05P3L/fantasy-console-wars-a-guide-to-the-biggest-players-in-retrogamings-newest-trend-56bbe948474d">They are attempts to re-create the artificial limitations</a> of video games from their early days. These self-contained programs are often built around extremely limited spaces of development. They do not allow programmers to expend the endless resources of modern computers, they allow for skim programs, and while they use modern programming languages, they are often stripped of a number of functions. <a href="https://paladin-t.github.io/fantasy/index">Each of these fantasy consoles</a> contain limitations that are meant to foster a sense of exploration and critical thinking about design, programming code, and how they fit together.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Jhg3dYl7m012wWS2B74mCw.gif" alt="A small, yet powerful slinky from sprite to finished product" /><em>A small, yet powerful slinky from sprite to finished product</em></p>
<p>Over the summer, I have been experimenting and learning a little bit about many of the different consoles that are out there. Of the different fantasy consoles i’ve seen, the one that has been the most well-considered for new programmers seems to be PICO-8.</p>
<p>You can see it in gif above. Note that this gif is generated by the software itself.</p>
<h3 id="pico-8-and-education">PICO-8 and Education</h3>
<p>After looking around trying to find something that met my initial grouping of 5 criteria, I started to dig a bit deeper into PICO-8. I found that my desires for a neat, interesting place to develop programming skills might be contained within the PICO-8 software.</p>
<p>Here is where it stood out.</p>
<h3 id="on-being-small-lightweight-easy-to-understand">On being small, lightweight, easy to understand</h3>
<p>PICO-8 installed requires 10mb of space. It uses a limited form of lua which requires a very small amount of memory. All of the space limitations are known values. For example, PICO-8 is limited to:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>a 128 x 128 pixel screen with 16 colors.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>carts that can hold 15,360 bytes of compressed code with a maximum of 65,536 characters.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>carts that reserve 12,544 bytes for graphics (8x8 sprites / blocks) and 4,608 bytes for sound but these can also be used for other purposes.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>a maximum of 256 sprites though these can be sacrificed for more map space.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>and a small, reserved and inaccessible amount of space in each cart for the lua interpreter.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>All of this is contained inside of a 10mb piece of software that costs just $15.00.</p>
<h3 id="on-being-a-simple-yet-comprehensive-interface">On being a simple, yet comprehensive interface</h3>
<p>The user interface consists of just 5 areas and a command line. Each of these do something specific for users to engage. Let’s take a walk through each.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/0*1ReqsXW8Nf25bpgJ.png" alt="The command line" /><em>The command line</em></p>
<p>This is <strong>the command line</strong> as it looks after booting up the console. Here, users can <a href="https://neko250.github.io/pico8-api/#pico8">enter commands</a> to run files, import carts from the clipboard, or a number of other commands. One of these is SPLORE which access a number of demos for new users.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/0*VThRmacpJ1_BtbIO.png" alt="SPLORE is constantly updated so users can see new games consistently." /><em>SPLORE is constantly updated so users can see new games consistently.</em></p>
<p><em>*The SPLORE menu **is a tiny graphic interface that let’s you look at various demo *cartridges</em> for PICO-8 as well as a number of recent uploads to the PICO-8 community. This tiny menu will download cartridges to your computer allowing whoever downloaded them to look at each of the interface screens to see how they’ve done something. As it stands, each cartridge is a tiny text-file with the file extension “.p8”. While all editing can occur within PICO-8, they can also be edited by any program that can deal with text files. There is also a neat <a href="https://packagecontrol.io/packages/PICO-8">extension for Sublime that mimics the code editor of PICO-8</a>.</p>
<p>From the command line, if users hit escape on their keyboard, they enter into a new user-interface.</p>
<h3 id="the-development-interface-for-pico-8">The Development Interface for PICO-8</h3>
<p>The user interface for PICO-8 is where all of the design occurs. Not only can you manipulate any game’s code from this interface, you can also load PICO-8 on certain hardware and program on the go. For example, the <a href="https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip">Pocket Chip</a> is a lightweight, hand-held system that can run PICO-8. If you have to go to work, go to class, or go anywhere you can take it with you.</p>
<p>The user interface contains the following screens:</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/0*ZerHdYq50Anbi66J.png" alt="The Code Editor" /><em>The Code Editor</em></p>
<p><strong>The Code Editor</strong> is for basic text but it will stylize commands as they are recognized. Anything here can be executed immediately at the command line..</p>
<p>Any errors will interrupt the program. The resulting error will be interpreted the line where the error first occurs will be pointed to.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/0*zaDSxi0AlQsZUf-q.png" alt="The Sprite Editor" /><em>The Sprite Editor</em></p>
<p><strong>The Sprite editor</strong> is as straight forward as they can be. Each sprite is assigned a number with an additional set of flags for each sprite allowing for complex interactivity to occur should the user desire it.</p>
<p>For animating sprites, they simply need to be drawn in each successive sprite area and run through with a number of if statements.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/0*WyOyqyBZXbXCdvQQ.png" alt="The Map Editor" /><em>The Map Editor</em></p>
<p><strong>The map editor</strong> allows for folks creating games that use maps to draw them as needed. The use of flags for sprites allow for programming-interested folks to use each sprite in different ways.</p>
<p>The picture to the left is one block of the map. Each of the blocks can be accessed here which allows for multiple levels in a game.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/0*JscRiJi29JqLZTAj.png" alt="The Sound Effects Editor" /><em>The Sound Effects Editor</em></p>
<p><strong>The sound effects editor</strong> allows for a number of different sound effects to be created in-house and ready to use in-game.</p>
<p>The editor uses different methods of generating noise that users can play around with easily until the sound effect sounds like what they want it to be. Each can be called upon by number.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/0*GOXnOjUfvqsBjCns.png" alt="The Music Editor" /><em>The Music Editor</em></p>
<p><strong>The music editor</strong> allows for patterns of notes to be repeated. There is room for 64 patterns each of which has 32 different notes that are possible.</p>
<p>Each of the individual notes are constructed around a standard music keyboard and can each be controlled as needed. Interestingly, there is not enough space for classic 8-bit music.</p>
<p>Each of these self-contained spaces allow users to not only engage in the act of programming, but also engage with the comprehensive aspect of designing a full-fledged product. As far as the requirement notes, this is an essential component of keeping programming and design in the same space.</p>
<h3 id="welcoming-to-newcomers-and-more-practiced-programmers">Welcoming to newcomers and more practiced programmers.</h3>
<p>Anyone new to programming is often shown integrated-development environments or specialized software like Jupyter Notebook. As they learn about how to program, they will get used to these software. Once this is done, they will inevitably have to learn other ways of doing things. Command Line Interfaces, the relationship of dependencies to programs, folder structures, and all the rest.</p>
<p>The nice part about PICO-8 is that it contains all of these things inside of one package. From SPLORE, you can look at all sorts of cartridges, you can look at their code, their sprites, their music. You can run them, you can even edit them as every PICO-8 cartridge is open sourced. Additionally, if a user types, “FOLDER” into the command line, it will open up the PICO-8 cartridge folder. Users can then explore the files themselves.</p>
<p>Additionally, since this is a text-editor, the relationship between the IDE and eventual text-editor norms for languages like lua are similarly replicated. All in all, this aspect of PICO-8 is one of my favorites.</p>
<p>Finally, there is a simply amazing user-community for PICO-8 but this will be explored below.</p>
<h3 id="on-being-easy-to-use-yet-difficult-to-master-as-a-feature-of-the-program">On being easy to use yet difficult to master as a feature of the program.</h3>
<p>Because this software is associated with video games, there are endless tutorials, endless examples for users to pull from. There are also any number of game jams, coding boot camps, and code cleanups to consider. Users, especially new users, can be looking at the code, sprites, and music that makes up games within seconds of installation. Similarly, users can “Hello World” quickly and keep building on it from there.</p>
<p>In fact, there are more than a few cartridges out there that build on the concept of “<a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=9994">Hello World</a>” to teach about the most frustrating aspect of video game development — the game loop. One of my favorite series thus far is from the Lazy Devs (seen below).</p>
<p>Finally, each cartridge allows for users to keep expanding their ideas without care for memory consequences. That is, until the artificial limit is hit. This feature of PICO-8 is perhaps the most useful. One aspect of programming that is often either over- or under-discussed is the availability of memory. Carts can hold 15,360 bytes of compressed code with a maximum of 65,536 characters.</p>
<p>This limit seems limitless for new users but as they learn more about the ways that games work, they will continually make longer and longer programs until they suddenly are forced to start to condense or optimize their code. At certain points, these limitations will force game designers to re-consider their games. Perhaps this feature or that is simply too much.</p>
<center><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nwszA68yQhA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></center>
<h3 id="on-being-reactive-with-immediate-feedback">On being reactive with immediate feedback</h3>
<p>Finally, reactive with immediate feedback is an essential component. For folks who are learning interpreted languages, this is something that occurs quite a bit but typically this is reserved for text-based concepts. I can do something like visualize a for-loop in python with the <a href="http://www.pythontutor.com/visualize.html#mode=edit">Python Tutor</a> but this does not really provide me with neat looking examples.</p>
<p>With PICO-8, I can draw squares and rectangles and watch as they move around the screen with variables in much the same way as processing. Additionally, I can also quickly upload my carts as they stand to the PICO-8 community so that they can be shared far and wide. Each cart exists in its own self-contained webpage. For example, the popular Celeste is available at:
<a href="https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2145"><strong>Celeste</strong>
<em>Good level design. Some of these strawberries are really interesting. I also liked how you teach which buttons are…</em>www.lexaloffle.com</a></p>
<p>and each aspect of the game can be found within the interface there. Additional features for comments, allow users to share their carts with friends and co-designers to examine the game within a browser that allows for others to share, examine the code, and actually play.</p>
<p>I am excited about the world of the fantasy console and I am super anxious to start to try and use it to teach the basics of programming and how that programming relates to objects within a design. While on first blush it seems to be a piece of software that lends itself to teaching programming,</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>the culture surrounding programming,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>the expectations of users creating games,</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>and the “trendiness” of a retro-oriented re-interpretation of the hardware limitations that fostered truly unique and memorable video games</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>all might lend themselves to truncating much of the possibility of fantasy consoles. Not being able to immediately make the games that “new designers” play every day can be disheartening. To them, I often point to this great bit from Ira Glass but often to little effect.</p>
<center><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3pCYIXgjXpA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></center>
<p>There is also pedagogical aspects of this style of software for an introduction to programming. Instead of a limited affordance IDE that attempts to bridge users used to software like microsoft word and proprietary text-files for interpreters or compilers, the act of programming is itself limited. Next, working with a piece of software like this might also not actually foster a sense of what a program actually does. The connection between a .p8 file and the PICO-8 software might never actually become an, “a-ha!” moment.</p>
<p>From a few reports i’ve seen on using PICO-8 in class, the way that PICO-8 presents itself seems partially hinder the act of learning how programming works. Or, at best, it takes those with a modicum of programming abilities and frustrates them as they attempt to use what they know inside of a new area that is too limited to be useful. The impact of these limitations on learning and fostering the idea of a balanced programmer is something that is in need of further study.</p>
<p>Along those lines, <a href="https://github.com/nicklalone/CIS---102---Getting-Started-with-Video-Game-Development">I have been slowly piecing together a course on introductory programming</a> and design using PICO-8 that will be running for the first time this semester. It is of course no where near ready but I am anxious to begin to edit it, add to it, and make it more accessible for students. Seeing what works for them, what they dislike, and what they wish they could know as they work through the content will no doubt allow me to start to understand if what I see as a better path to learning a more balanced approach to engaging a computer at the programmatic level is actually viable.</p>Nick LaLonenick.lalone@gmail.comFantasy Consoles are self-contained video game development environments so incredibly constrained that users have no choice but to learn how programming works.On the Impact of Nonhumans in Social Network Analysis2017-07-28T00:00:00-07:002017-07-28T00:00:00-07:00https://nicklalone.com/posts/2018/11/on_the_impact_of_nonhumans<p>I got some reviews back the other day on my first attempt to produce something from my dissertation research. Of the reviews, one aspect that stood out was that there was a need for “more detail.” Simple associations like those found in Social Network Analysis just aren’t enough for something substantial. And, for the most part, I agree.</p>
<h1 id="on-the-impact-of-nonhumans-in-social-network-analysis">On the Impact of Nonhumans in Social Network Analysis</h1>
<p>There is a certain aspect of what i’m trying to pursue with this work that could simply be called, “The impact of anthropomorphism.” From a design perspective, the idea of certain aspects of a computational system are being reacted to and interacted with as “human” is of particular interest. After all, if you can reliably predict what aspects of any software are going to be anthropomorphized, why wouldn’t you want to enhance that? It’s easier to learn from a friend than it is from an uncaring machine.</p>
<p>While that could be called the eventual goal of this method, as it stands, i’m at the starting line trying to figure out what sport i’m playing.</p>
<p>Before any development can happen, it is necessary to define what a map of associations is, how that map of associations is formed, and what objects are included. Even within those questions is a more sinister one: *how do you determine groups within an assemblage or monadology? What is the selection criteria? *Do you simply allow the objects to mark themselves? Or, within design, do you specify by the designer’s idea about what groups can and should exist.</p>
<p>The most obvious way to separate objects into groups is to separate all of the humans and all of the non-humans. Within SNA, this provides something that…is perhaps worse than only including humans and humans only.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*lePx11YSl7Ze2mew1bUfpA.jpeg" alt="Social Network with only Non-Humans and Humans as Vertices." /><em>Social Network with only Non-Humans and Humans as Vertices.</em></p>
<p>But what is this? One black box interacting with another black box. It’s directional because there is an association that occurs between these two sets of actors.</p>
<p>It isn’t enough to simply separate the non-human objects from the human objects. At its core, any activity is going to consist of humans and nonhumans forming bonds to achieve goals. Without these bonds, without these associations, there is no agency.</p>
<p>So the next step might be something like separating those objects that humans must use to achieve goals into groups. Since I am using *Catan *as an example space for this method, the group of objects that make sense are:</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*CztioMFSZH-VDWvbVDa-hQ.png" alt="A standard map. The red, white, orange, and blue pieces represent the players and are most likely to be those things that require grouping." /><em>A standard map. The red, white, orange, and blue pieces represent the players and are most likely to be those things that require grouping.</em></p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><em>Player — as in, the player themselves.</em></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Cities — the upgraded settlement pieces.</em></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Settlements — the pieces that represent a settlement of that player’s people.</em></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Road Pieces — the little bits of wood that allow the players to traverse the map.</em></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Player Resources — Bricks, Ore, Sheep, Wood, and Grain owned by the player.</em></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Their Phone — because no one is without their phone and I didn’t police it.</em></p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>But what does this do to the map? If these objects are grouped, then what is gained in terms of knowledge? How does this impact the possible insight into what users are doing with a particular group of non-human objects?</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*kpjk2CqYPaySgj8ezulNAg.jpeg" alt="I suppose it looks a little demonic." /><em>I suppose it looks a little demonic.</em></p>
<p>In a sense, this is still the same issue. By grouping the objects humans require to achieve their agency, we must effectively black box all of those objects humans must recruit in order to even make their own resources effective.</p>
<p>This is where grouping becomes an issue. While SNA can map direct associations between things, it does little to connect the consequences of chains of associations.</p>
<p>For example, in order for me to build a road as a player in Catan, I need to have 2 resources — a piece of wood and some brick. However, in order for me to achieve that goal, the dice, the numbers on the terrain, and the terrain itself must be recruited in order to achieve that goal. As such, to simply include the result of a complex chain of associations is simply more black boxing.</p>
<p>However, we do gain some insight. While the players are connected to their non-human objects, there is still a lot more going on within this assemblage at the non-human level than the human level. In the above picture, the non-human objects are drawn according to their number. The sheer number of objects is so massive that we have no choice but to break them down. This is where SNA that includes non-human objects becomes something of a tremendously time-intensive task.</p>
<p>Going back to that review, the thing that is of interest is that the “action” an object takes that results in the “re-action” from a human is of particular interest to them. The review went on at length from this premise. It is indeed a powerful statement to be able to mark the time, the context, and the consequences of anthropomorphizing. Within Catan, this happens quite often — the dice hate me, stupid sheep, and more. However, the reason this is an eventual goal is that the act of mapping out what I currently have has been months and months of work.</p>
<p>I know i’m not alone in trying to engage this particular method. It has been attempted here and there. My favorite attempt thus far is from Dr. Jamie Banks (@amperjay on twitter). Banks attempted to do something similar specifically in the realm of Communication.</p>
<p>In her piece, she presented:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/jgvw/2014/00000006/00000003/art00003?crawler=true">Object-relation mapping: A method for analysing phenomenal assemblages
of play</a>
Theories of play assemblages and technological agency have met popular acceptance in game studies. However, current approaches to empirically examining these notions are limited to resource-intensive ethnographies not suitable for many types of enquiries, particularly those focusing on micro-level analyses and the lived experiences of play. This article proposes an analytical method called ‘object-relation mapping’ (ORM). ORM incorporates techniques from Actor–Network Theory, social network analysis, phenomenology and Grounded Theory to examine phenomenal assemblages of play at micro-, meso- and macro-levels. In particular, ORM provides a systematic framework for collecting, deconstructing, restructuring and coding data gleaned from players’ subjective experience of play. This article outlines ORM’s theoretical underpinnings, techniques, benefits, challenges and extensions.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Within this, Banks attempted to present a 1-level stand point (micro-, meso-, and macro-) by processing interview data computationally. She intends to offer a means through which to gain insight into a human-centric world made up of objects humans relate to. By understanding what terms are associated with what objects, there’s a level of insight that hasn’t been possible in the past. While I would offer that ANT itself is not a set of ideas that would afford humans such a hierarchically superior place within any assemblage, the benefit from this method is sound. It is a also fantastic paper and raises a lot of interesting ideas about what Graph Theory can do within a corpus of text — regardless of the text’s origin (subjectivity/objectivity/generalizability as matters of concern). While this is not necessarily SNA, it still uses the same processes.</p>
<p>She concludes with what i’m feeling right now.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Because of these difficulties and the nature of the object-relation cataloguing and the coding process, the ORM method can be tedious and time-consuming. Each phase of the project may take many months, multiple iterations and meticulous attention to detail. Further, because situations are emergent and ephemeral, networks are unstable (see Law 2009; Rabinow 2003; Taylor 2009) and the researcher must either settle for a ‘snapshot’ of a situation at a particular point in time) or continue to trace object-relations and evolve the situation network landscape as the situation itself evolves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s a certain level of tedium that is necessary to consider. The entire reason that Gabriel Tarde’s work was not followed through on was that it simply wasn’t mathematically possible. At the moment, while graph theory is still somewhat “new” it is not outside the realm of possibility to create a model that can grow or shrink dynamically over an undefined concept of time. Nor is it outside of the realm of time and effort with the tools that exist in the present.</p>
<p>So in the end, what are the groups in question? To be honest, as i’ve considered this, I have not come up with a good schema. I’ve added variables to the various edges about who is associating. I covered this in the last post I put up. I’ve also included what aspect of the assemblage that particular edge represents. Inside the magic circle are supposed to be those objects that maintain the space inside. However, bridging devices like phones and tablets allow for us to maintain multiple circles all at once. So, while these are variables and not groups, some grouping manages to occur by simple variable label.</p>
<p>One thing that I will note is that grouping does allow you to define the black box. As a designer, there are some things you probably should box up. The core functionality and security of a system are important enough to box up to the point where they are not accessible by the user. So too are the various parameters of a game. However, something magical occurs when you group all of the objects of a game — that thing that is supposed to be the system maintained inside the magic circle look somewhat different.</p>
<p><img src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*XZ_7MsKFblQGvxqOpLLYsQ.jpeg" alt="Outside of the magic circle is an entire circle in and of itself" /><em>Outside of the magic circle is an entire circle in and of itself</em></p>
<p>The interesting thing about this visualization is that the game objects are intended to be the parameters of the game. They are those things that make up what the magic circle has bounded.</p>
<p>We often only afford this type of language, these types of analyses to play and games. However, they are not limited to play insomuch as play is the manner through which society itself formed. As rule keepers of countless magic circles that must be maintained daily, weekly, hourly, or even by the minute during a lunch break, I want to bring a way to visualize these complexities and also to allow them to be understood, to be used in design itself.</p>
<p>So sure, I haven’t provided a level of detail that is, of itself, useful to everyone but starting somewhere seems better than doing nothing.</p>Nick LaLonenick.lalone@gmail.comI got some reviews back the other day on my first attempt to produce something from my dissertation research. Of the reviews, one aspect that stood out was that there was a need for “more detail.” Simple associations like those found in Social Network Analysis just aren’t enough for something substantial. And, for the most part, I agree.Ludic Gatekeepers and the Unclear Simulation2015-02-09T00:00:00-08:002015-02-09T00:00:00-08:00https://nicklalone.com/posts/2015/02/Syria_sim_writeup<p>In early 2014, I began to lay the groundwork for a simulation meant to train crisis management personnel on the growing impact of social media during response efforts. Later, this work would make its way into a proposal submitted on behalf of the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) meant to do just that. Our proposal outlined the need and benefit of a simulation that was created to be engaged in-person, was <a href="http://annex.ipacweb.org/library/conf/03/havighurst.pdf">low fidelity</a>, low technology, and meant for for resource strapped crisis management services in rural portions of the European Union. Simulations like these are invaluable for <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2966567/">all manner of training</a>.</p>
<p>As I worked my way through the sizable chunk of literature devoted to simulation, I spoke about my work to Ed Webb. I was curious what he had to say since simulation as a tool in political science was still very much a learning tool. He informed me that he had had a hand in designing a simulation that included the country of Syria and several of its neighbors.</p>
<p>The purpose of the simulation that was to be held in Carlisle, PA was to get military and civilian students from different majors and branches of the military to engage a political crisis together, in opposite roles. In addition to military as civilians and civilians as military, the simulation would feature high-level advisers who had intimate knowledge of the U.S. government duties the simulation would ask its participants to perform.</p>
<p>At the welcome dinner, Ed took the podium and began to talk about what was going to happen during the simulation. He mentioned, rather emphatically, that he viewed himself as a Dungeon Master. I was somewhat shocked that Ed had approached this simulation as one would approach a large-scale game of Dungeons and Dragons. However, as I looked around the room to gauge how people felt about this admission, it seemed that the gravity of this concept had gone over most of the room’s head. After dinner and the initial socialization period for participants, I walked back to the hotel wondering how things would pan out.</p>
<p><strong>Dungeon Masters and Role-play</strong><br />
The term Dungeon Master comes from a variety of games that task a group of people to become characters in a story given a set of rules. A simple reference to make here is the Lord of the Rings. Imagine that players assemble around the table. One player plays as Frodo Baggins; another player takes the role of Legolas whereas others may take on the role of Aragorn and Gimli. With the players set, there is also a need for someone to essentially become Middle Earth itself. That player, the one playing as the world the characters live in is commonly referred to as a Dungeon Master, Lore Master, Game Controller, or Information Provider.</p>
<p>These games (e.g. Traveler, Dungeons & Dragons, Tunnels & Trolls, and thousands more) came to prominence throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The designers of games like <em>Dungeons & Dragons</em> or <em>Tunnels & Trolls</em> wanted to create a system of rules through which individual characters (instead of military units) could take actions by themselves. As the war game industry began to collapse under its own weight due to surplus production, the role-playing industry began to thrive as the 1980s began.</p>
<p>These role-playing games were different from their war gaming counterparts. War games place the player as a commander of a battlefield filled with military units. In a role-playing game, players take on the role of a single character (aside from the Dungeon Master). Most interesting, was the dissection of the player from their character. It was here that a relationship formed - that of the avatar and its player. In early iterations of games like Dungeons and Dragons, players reportedly played as themselves in these games. However, this moved to the creation of a character as it seemed as though players who are playing as themselves do not feel any tension because if they die in-game, they are still there in real life (Shick, 1991).</p>
<p>Over time, these types of games have gained a foothold in popular culture. More importantly for the purposes of this report, these games have also entered the world of education. After all, the concept of dissecting one’s self from their individuality fosters empathy through playing as someone else. In addition, exploration of the space those other characters, sometimes referred to as avatars, exist in can be valuable for teaching.</p>
<p><strong>Simulations and Education</strong><br />
In education, the role-playing game has been labeled as the simulation or the role-play (Ebner & Kovach, 2011). In addition, they are also given the label of experiental education-based simulations. Experiment-based education simulations allow players to consider other perspectives than their own as well as experience how their own positions may have to act given unique situations. These types of games are most often deployed in cases like the one Ed was part of – international negotiation.<br />
Alexander and LeBaron (2009) – have begun to outline many of the goals that the international simulation pursues. These include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Specific ideas about a lot of topics.</li>
<li>How various strategies can be used and their cultural capital cost.</li>
<li>How competition and collaboration can work in situations like these. </li>
<li>Fostering Communication and problem solving</li>
<li>Critical Reflection</li>
</ul>
<p>Many of these skills are difficult to teach directly so the role-play allows students to take on the role of a specific individual in a specific situation. Through the help of the role-playing game and the concept of the Dungeon Master, students can be taught the unteachable aspects of international negotiation.</p>
<p>At the beginning of the simulation about Syria, the students organized into their particular branches (e.g. White House, Department of Defense, etc). At these meetings, I saw students wrestling not only with their own stereotypically held beliefs about their own positions and their particular office. In addition, I saw the players wrestling (and in most cases resolving) their stereotypical beliefs about their opposites (civilian vs military). It would seem that within the first hour, the simulation had already provided significant insight for the players.</p>
<p><strong>The Simulation Begins</strong><br />
Before the official first day of the simulation, the character of the various departments involved with this crisis had already made itself known. The radically short socialization period of each particular branch had become characterized by the so-called ludic gatekeeper or adviser of each department. For example, the participants of various departments immediately started to wrestle with trying to gain control of the crisis response because their adviser essentially told them that they should.</p>
<p>With the help of the ludic gatekeepers, each portion of the various departments were clearly defined. Cultural capital immediately started being sought out. How would each department come to pursue its own agenda? What sorts of compromises would have to be made? What did they have to trade? By the beginning of Day 2 – at the War College itself – all of the players were in their roles and all of the individual groups of players understood what they were supposed to do. The game’s boundaries had disappeared.</p>
<p>As an observer, I made a point to spend time in the controller’s office quite a bit. I placed myself here so I could listen to the discussions the various advisers had with Ed and his co-game master but also so I could hear what Ed had in store for the players.</p>
<p>Whereas a traditional simulation or traditional role-play would look like this:</p>
<p><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4zIpqA4LZ8w/VNjv1jmcVOI/AAAAAAAAeDo/oFYk2CeB70k/s1600/structure.PNG"><img src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4zIpqA4LZ8w/VNjv1jmcVOI/AAAAAAAAeDo/oFYk2CeB70k/s1600/structure.PNG" alt="" /></a></p>
<p>With the various players circulating knowledge among themselves all the while being filtered and partially controlled by the Dungeon Master, this role-play was structured like this:</p>
<p><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Zg8SiHrg8r0/VNjuQ4TD_gI/AAAAAAAAeDM/nqcLaBDN3z8/s1600/ed%2Bstructure.PNG"><img src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Zg8SiHrg8r0/VNjuQ4TD_gI/AAAAAAAAeDM/nqcLaBDN3z8/s1600/ed%2Bstructure.PNG" alt="" /></a></p>
<p>The additional layer between the world and the players is perhaps the most significant contributor to the eventual success of the simulation itself. The advisers, themselves playing a role that they had actually held, served as holders of knowledge. It was as if each member of each of the acting groups of this particular simulation had an avatar of that group’s norms and values.</p>
<p>Perhaps more interesting than the role of the advisers are the Dungeon Masters themselves. By filtering all data out through the adviser, by remaining hidden, the “game” portion of this simulation (aka the fact that it wasn’t real) was diminished. Even though the players know that Ed and the control room are handling all the communication, they can only see that control coming from the advisers themselves.</p>
<p>It was difficult to point this out if one was to simply sit in the individual rooms and observe. However, during each confab, whereupon everyone gathered to discuss their findings and plans, the socialization into the various roles the players had been placed into was very apparent.</p>
<p>As the simulation entered day 2, I began to see these entities start to gain life of their own (the players surrendered to the game). I began to take trips to the bathrooms on each floor and sit there for some time trying to observe special deals being made. It was here that I began to hear the participants of the simulations make secret deals and negotiate certain decisions outside of the official channels. The simulation had become so powerful that cheating or unofficial discussions were now being made within the simulation itself.</p>
<p>The ludic gatekeepers, the advisers, had essentially, at this point, socialized the participants fully into the game. The players’ detachment from the Game Masters fostered a sense of individuality and group cohesion in ways that I do not think could have been anticipated or planned for. When the Simulation ended, one thing that stood out was how powerful the participants coming face to face with their preconceptions was.</p>
<p>During the simulation debrief, a concept about how either side of this simulation (military or civilian) were surprised at the demeanor of the other. On the one hand, the civilians were somewhat amazed that the military practitioners didn’t want to send war assets into an area. On the other, the military personnel were surprised that the civilians were more apt to send the military.</p>
<p><strong>Preparation and Rules</strong><br />
Something interesting shows up when one looks at the results of the post-simulation survey. The results looked like this:</p>
<p><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VftHoKz0Ljc/VNjuQwE757I/AAAAAAAAeDU/Sh2hH7FDjA4/s1600/qs.PNG"><img src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VftHoKz0Ljc/VNjuQwE757I/AAAAAAAAeDU/Sh2hH7FDjA4/s1600/qs.PNG" alt="" /></a></p>
<ul>
<li>Q1: How much time did you spend preparing?</li>
<li>Q2: How useful were the background materials?</li>
<li>Q5: Did your team work well together?</li>
<li>Q6: how would you rate your understanding of the rules?</li>
<li>Q7: Rate the quality of your individual participation</li>
<li>Q8: Rate the effectiveness of the large group summits.</li>
<li>Q9 How useful were the team sessions?</li>
<li>Q10: How satisfied were you overall?</li>
</ul>
<p>Q1 and Q2 engaged preparation. On average, we can say that participants prepared for this simulation anywhere between 1 and 5 hours and found the materials they received at least a little useful. This information is unsurprising. What is surprising is Question 6 and Question 10.</p>
<p>Q6 was worded, “How would you rate your understanding of the rules for this Simulation?” While slightly above average, this score on a 5 point scale is the lowest average of all the questions. Pair this with Q10, “How satisfied were you with the overall operation of the Simulation?” and surprisingly, a score of 4.57 indicates an overwhelmingly positive experience. However, given a lack of knowledge about the rules (Q6), how could one be satisfied with the outcome (q10)?</p>
<p>There are two interpretations that can be made of these two questions. First, the simulation was a success but the rules need to be made more coherent and more visible. In fact, there is evidence for this given one participant’s written in comment of, “There were specific rules?” However, there is another interpretation for this.</p>
<p>The second interpretation is that even though this was a simulation, the existence of the game master, hidden behind their ludic gatekeepers maintained their roles, roles they had previously held, so well that they served to give life to the simulation and so it was that the participants had no choice but to engage the situation and not the game. The situation in the simulation, even if it was not simulated, would be somewhat foggy</p>
<p>In fact, I would posit that the reason the simulation worked was a lack of clarity and a lack of presence of the dungeon master. The players had no choice but to continue as though they were doing the job they were just figuring out. This allowed the players to stake out their own rules together and fully immerse themselves not in their roles, but in the crisis itself.</p>
<p><strong>Closing Remarks</strong><br />
In a response to an article in the realm of international negotiation called, “The Death of Role-Play,” the authors remarked that the facilitators of simulations often over-rely on canned materials and rules to communicate what the students are supposed to learn. This has created a situation whereupon simulation has grown stale, if not dead entirely.</p>
<p>The authors propose that those who create simulations think more deeply about what it is their students are doing when they begin to consider how their own assumptions influence the way that roles, hierarchical structures, and power relations interact among the actors in a given situation.<br />
Further, they suggest:</p>
<ul>
<li>A move toward creativity and lateral thinking, and away from the primarily-cognitive workshop environment…;</li>
</ul>
<p>This is indicative of Ed’s approach to this situation. Instead of approaching it using a manuscript of a simulation, carefully defining the ways and means groups would interact, he outlined a framework through which the participants could:</p>
<ul>
<li>challenge participants to reveal themselves authentically;</li>
</ul>
<p>In this way, we saw the individuals present at the simulation and not their interpretation of the role. It was the epitome of role-playing. This allowed the participants to:</p>
<ul>
<li>Increase self-discovery through self-participation and reflection;</li>
</ul>
<p>The scenes I observed in the bathroom indicated that while this was a game, it was one worthy of making back room deals and outside conversations. This made the participants have:</p>
<ul>
<li>More meaningful learning as participants draw directly on their stories, associations, and experiences; and</li>
</ul>
<p>While we saw a lot of complaints from the military students about how blood-thirsty the civilians were. This created a situation whereupon meaning was created – not for the civilians – but for the military students to reflect on their own existence as a military member.</p>
<p>Finally, this simulation allowed the students to learn:</p>
<ul>
<li>Better negotiation performance arising from engaging emotional and kinesthetic brain centers associated with deep shifts in skills, attitudes and behaviors.</li>
</ul>
<p>In all ways, the simulation not only addressed the concerns the international negotiation world had about the lessening impact about simulation, it surpassed the “future thinking” and integrated models this literature puts forth.</p>
<p><strong>References</strong><br />
Alexander, N., & LeBaron, M. (2009). Death of the role-play. Hamline J. Pub. L. & Pol’y, 31, 459.</p>
<p>Alexander, N., & LeBaron, M. (2013). Embodied Conflict Resolution: Resurrecting Roleplay-Based Curricula Through Dance. Educating Negotiators for a Connected World (Saint Paul: DRI Press, 2013), 539-567.</p>
<p>Ebner, N., & Kovach, K. K. (2010). Simulations 2.0: The resurrection. Rethinking negotiation teaching, 2.<br />
Schick, L. (1991). Heroic Worlds. A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games, Buffalo/New York.</p>Nick LaLonenick.lalone@gmail.comIn early 2014, I began to lay the groundwork for a simulation meant to train crisis management personnel on the growing impact of social media during response efforts. Later, this work would make its way into a proposal submitted on behalf of the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) meant to do just that. Our proposal outlined the need and benefit of a simulation that was created to be engaged in-person, was low fidelity, low technology, and meant for for resource strapped crisis management services in rural portions of the European Union. Simulations like these are invaluable for all manner of training.One-Shot Review: A Slow Year2012-03-28T00:00:00-07:002012-03-28T00:00:00-07:00https://nicklalone.com/posts/2015/02/A_Slow_Year<p>In Austin, Texas about 6 or 7 years ago there was this strange rebirth of alternate ways of making and riding bicycles. Most would associate this with the generally weird and purposefully alternative atmosphere that makes Austin…weird. But as these bikes rode around town, people began to talk about how nostalgic these bikes were. It was as if they came from a different time, a time when the bicycle may have had a different future, a different look. It is with this nostalgia that we take a different sort of trip to a place where the future of video games could have been a different one. In this future, we will begin with Ian Bogost’s <em>A Slow Year.</em></p>
<p><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--JHdpKyH4Fc/T3O-ZpyYLBI/AAAAAAAAGwc/cHQ9Sr7AuOc/s1600/image_7713450.jpg"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--JHdpKyH4Fc/T3O-ZpyYLBI/AAAAAAAAGwc/cHQ9Sr7AuOc/s320/image_7713450.jpg" alt="" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.likecool.com/Mutant_bicycles_by_Todd_Kundla--Bike--Gear.html">Todd Kundla</a> - Not from Austin but he rode one of his bikes here as fast as he could</p>
<p>How things change and how technologies diverge or converge over time is a constant topic of discussion when a product gains a permanent foothold in culture. The fervor of this conversation fades quickly as that particular technology gains a universal, almost invisible status until it is finally displaced by something new. There, the cycle begins all over again. In our age of nostalgia, this is becoming more and more common, especially in popular culture. The easiest example to use is the movie <em>Super 8</em> and the way it tried to capture our nostalgia for E.T. by taking Spielberg’s work and attempting to bring a sense of the present from the past.</p>
<p>There is almost a desperation to this furious re-working of nostalgia. Re-using ideas has never been as obvious as it is right now as we enter into HD Remakes, Re-boots, and alternate realities for characters who have been around for centuries. The desperation behind all of this feels a little sad, almost fleeting. It is as if the <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178055">Phillip Larkin poem</a>, “This be the verse” has somehow inserted itself into the fabric of capitalism:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had.
And add some extra, just for you.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You could say that the re-make craze currently happening is an attempt to take our parents faults and remake them into our own. It feels somehow shallow, somehow incomplete because we don’t all have children of our own to pass things off to…especially when you consider how different video games feel now compared to when our parents may have played them (not very different).</p>
<p>So what does any of this have to do with an Atari 2600 game Ian Bogost released in 2010? Well, at least for this reviewer, the experience of this game really made me wonder about how video games have developed throughout time. In particular, I wondered if something have gone differently that would have allowed games to leave the “masculine” space they currently exist in?</p>
<p><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kBYN-6sunro/T3PGVChlR5I/AAAAAAAAGwo/0POXJg-czyk/s1600/516w54LpdrL.jpg"><img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kBYN-6sunro/T3PGVChlR5I/AAAAAAAAGwo/0POXJg-czyk/s1600/516w54LpdrL.jpg" alt="" /></a></p>
<p>With that in mind, let me explain what a gamer does in <em>A Slow Year.</em> In short, this game is simple enough to explain. There are 4 different “games,” each representing a season. Each season is a digitized poem, represented by a series of what could only be referred to as “meditative actions.” In the fall, we watch the leaves fall off of trees, in the winter, we sit at a table sipping coffee while looking out at the freshly fallen snow. Each season is governed by the gamer’s need to press a button but for me, I felt like it wasn’t needed. <em>A Slow Year</em> is about meditating.</p>
<p>In fact, this meditation is augmented by poetry generated by a machine. There are 1000 machined Haiku (the earliest conceptualization I know of this is from <a href="http://www.in-vacua.com/cgi-bin/haiku.pl">Margaret Masterman and Robin McKinnon-Wood</a> in 1968). These poems are unique and actually far more complex when meaning is attempted to be applied to them than the poems people make when they write in the Haiku book I have in my bathroom for guests to write in. One of my favorites is Poem 216:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The wheeze bangs a breeze / A gusty patch kills a tree / Breaths can caress it</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>A Slow Year</em> takes the assumptions of our present world, ones that we seem to be trying to do something with through all of these re-imaginings of older times, but doesn’t try to re-establish them with the technology as it is now. Instead, <em>A Slow Year</em> tries to ask a question of us all - What would have happened if games like <em>A Slow Year</em> had been created when this type of game was the technological equivalent of <em>Crysis?</em></p>
<p>Unlike all of the things this game made me think of, <em>A Slow Year</em> isn’t about nostalgia, it is about regret. In the trying times we exist in currently, <em>A Slow Year</em> asks us if we had started down a different path, would we have managed to get to this exact same place? </p>
<p>Probably not. If we take the gamer as they exist today, I do not believe this game would resonate with them. There is not really a lot of modern gameplay here, no achievements, nothing more than pressing a button or moving a cursor to catch leaves. This makes the game something of an anomaly because <em>A Slow Year</em> is something that gamers need. We need to be reminded that virtualization of procedure, of the world around us, of our fiction, need not always be imbued with war and competition. </p>
<p><em>A Slow Year</em> can be purchased from <a href="http://www.opentexture.com/products/aslowyear/">Open Texture</a> and re-purposed Atari Cartridges by <a href="http://www.bogost.com/games/game_poems.shtml">contacting him through the various ways people can contact each other</a>.</p>Nick LaLonenick.lalone@gmail.comIn Austin, Texas about 6 or 7 years ago there was this strange rebirth of alternate ways of making and riding bicycles. Most would associate this with the generally weird and purposefully alternative atmosphere that makes Austin…weird. But as these bikes rode around town, people began to talk about how nostalgic these bikes were. It was as if they came from a different time, a time when the bicycle may have had a different future, a different look. It is with this nostalgia that we take a different sort of trip to a place where the future of video games could have been a different one. In this future, we will begin with Ian Bogost’s A Slow Year.