Masticate Masticate Masticate

Minecraft Text Pack

2011-01-04T11:49:00.017Z

Like many people, my initial experience with Minecraft involved first thinking, 'this game looks terrible!' and then coming up for air 48 hours later, charmed and hooked.

Many of my thoughts while playing have been about the relationship between the visual look and shape of the game, and its underlying structure. The blockiness, I think, is one of the keys to the game's satisfaction -- the system is simple enough to make any individual action predictable and satisfying, while being complicated enough to allow for grand schemes and emergent complexity.

For the most part, when I play, I mentally edit out the textures in the game to their symbolic meanings -- I don't care so much what dirt looks like, so long as I know it is dirt and understand its behaviors and relationships to other blocks and items.

But when I saw that people were playing with texture packs, I looked again at how I play. Would giving the game a different look make for a meaningfully different experience?

Most of the texture packs I downloaded attempt to make the textures look better without making them much different. A block of dirt that looks more dirt-like or matches a specific esthetic theme. Patches to support higher resolution blocks that look even more dirt-like.

At first I started (and am still in the process of) making a texture pack that is simply more visually appealing to my eye. But I still wonder how far the relationship between the look and the structure can be stretched. Is the game playable when stripped down to its symbolic meaning? Would it be feasible to add a drastically different system of narrative interpretation onto the same set of blocks and attendant behaviors and relationships?

As a first step, and to while away some of those London-is-shut-for-the-holidays hours, I made a text-based texture pack. Almost everything has been changed from an image into text on a white or transparent background.

It's still a bit rough around the edges, but it gets the idea across. As a side benefit, the image files themselves serve as a sort of cheat sheet for block IDs.

The shapes remain. The relationships remain. And it's (mostly) playable.

To install:
*Download TEXT.zip.
*Follow these instructions on the minecraft wiki.

Moving Parts

2010-02-07T10:36:00.019Z

Moving Parts is a two-player hybrid physical/video pinball game in which variations in game rules elicit different social interactions between the players. Developed as my thesis project at ITP, it was an experiment in uncovering connections between game mechanics, social relationships, and player experience. I presented the game at the 2009 SIGGRAPH Sandbox Video Game Symposium; the paper from that is here.

Moving Parts consists of a wooden table with players stationed at opposite ends. A digital pinball game is projected onto the tabletop, and players control ball launch and flippers with physical controls.

At the start of the game, players can choose one of four variations—competitive, cooperative, synchronized, and multiball. In each version, players score points by hitting bumpers arranged on the table, progress through levels by hitting each bumper at least once, and, as in typical pinball, use the flippers to keep the ball in play for as long as possible. The rule variations affect whether the score is individual (competitive and multiball) or shared (cooperative and synchronized), and in the synchronized version players share control of all the flippers.

In addition to my usual interest in playing with the boundaries between physical and digital interfaces, all of this was a somewhat arcane way to watch how people play games together, and how changing the way a game works changes how people relate to each other. The game was iterated and play-tested over a couple of months on the ITP floor, and was more extensively play-tested at the 2008 Spring Show.

I was mostly able to collect anecdotes and make some tentative generalizations—some obvious things like ‘players tend to talk more when the game requires less focused concentration,’ but some less obvious, like ‘players tend to talk and laugh more when competing, while they apologize and appear more anxious when cooperating.’ Overall, it illustrated that game mechanics and rules do affect how people socially interact with each other in the context of the game, and not necessarily in simple ways. (Delving into more specifics of how that all works is of course a longer-term prospect.)

The Three Houses

2010-02-01T21:19:00.005Z

an alternate reality game for two players

The Three Houses is a highly immersive game designed for two players. It was played once in the winter of 2007. Developers and puppet masters included Michael Dory, Leah Gilliam, Kate Hartman, Adam Parrish, Ruth Sergel, Adam Simon, Daniel Soltis, Scott Varland, and Kyveli Vezani.

The game took place over a weekend in the streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Through solving verbal and physical puzzles and searching for hidden items, players uncovered aspects of their own and New York's history and decided how to respond to the developing story. Game elements included communication via email, phone, and letter; physical artifacts (including flowers and magic boxes); and live performance.

In addition to presenting a story, the game moved players through different relationships with each other and with the game itself. The players were initially led to believe that they were playing alone, and then that they were playing in opposition to each other. By talking outside of the clearly defined game activities, the players forged an alliance and ultimately abandoned the puppet masters' instructions (and supervision) and sought the game's conclusion together.

Rumpelstiltskin: an Artefactual Performance

2010-02-01T20:31:00.014Z

developed with Adam Simon

This is as head-achingly academic as I've ever gotten. Rumpelstiltskin is a two-player, gesture-based video game in which players unknowingly act out a pantomime of the fairy tale "Rumpelstiltskin."

The game is built on a small stage, and players progress through the game by following screen prompts to perform various gestures. Each gesture, however, is part of a choreography, and (theoretically) by successfully playing the game the players also perform a story.

This game was a response to some topics I'd been thinking about that year -- boundaries between play and performance, and between intentional and incidental movements; social interactions within a game and between players and non-players; boundaries of public and private in the context of physical movement. I decided to take a head-on approach and throw all of it together into one monstrosity (while also having some fun with using Processing for color tracking).

I don't think it ever resulted in a coherent performance (in part because the story we chose was too complex), but it was a good avenue for looking at some of those topics--from performativity to how well people translate visual cues into body movements--in a writ-large context.

It was performed at the 2007 ITP Winter Show.

Yoda says:

2008-09-04T20:09:00.003+01:00

Following a flood at the Tinker offices, things were in disarray.
Among the flotsam unearthed by the flood was a half disassembled Yoda doll.
After the application of a dab of solder and a bit of hot glue, it informed us:

Kew Gardens

2008-08-30T22:37:00.003+01:00

Went to Kew Gardens today and, for the first time in quite a while, brought my camera.

These birds--Golden Pheasants, says the internet--were quite unconcerned with nearby humans.

Small fish. Lily pad:

Anthropomorphic flower. More coral-omorphic, really. Or jack-in-the-box-omorphic:

Repeating Boat

2008-08-29T23:04:00.003+01:00

I was looking at my partner's photos from when we lived in San Francsico and came across a panorama I took of the water front. I was into taking panoramas for a while there--probably because San Francisco has a host of panoramic views... This is one of my favorites, because the boat kept moving as I rotated the camera around. I like that the boat gives a sense of progression through time in what otherwise looks like a static context.

Competitive Picnicking

2008-08-25T22:10:00.016+01:00

designed with Michael Dory, Adam Simon, and Scott Varland of Social Bomb.

Throw down your blanket! Will you end the day surrounded by friends and eating a delicious meal, or will you be invaded by ants and left stranded and hungry on the edge of the party?

Competitive Picnicking is a large multiplayer game of trading items and claiming territories, set on a big lawn on a sunny summer day and using food as game pieces. Players come to the picnic with the basic ingredients for lunch and play a culinary variant of go fish to assemble the highest-scoring snacks and sandwiches.

Competitive Picnicking has been played at the June 2008 Come Out and Play Festival in New York, NY, and the February 2009 Adelaide Film Festival in Adelaide, Australia, and it looks like the Indianapolis Theater Fringe Festival played a variant in August 2009.

Photos from NY and Adelaide:

UpWrite: Improving Posture and Pressure in Handwriting

2008-08-25T12:00:00.004+01:00

designed with Heidi Press for the Developing Assistive Technologies class at ITP

UpWrite is a system that monitors pencil pressure, non-dominant hand pressure and foot position in order to help students improve their handwriting.

BACKGROUND
Occupational therapist Heidi Press works in a primary school with children with learning disabilities. Many of her students have handwriting difficulties; they write illegibly and quickly become tired and frustrated. This in turn interferes with their ability to focus on and complete tasks.

Handwriting is affected by a number of interconnected factors, including foot alignment, trunk strength, arm alignment, pencil grasp, and pencil pressure. Press has noted that many of her students are unaware of and unable to correct body position or pencil pressure. Further, she is unable to continuously observe these factors while working with other students or paying attention to other aspects of students' work.

She wanted to develop a system to monitor students' posture and handwriting pressure, provide very simple feedback for students, and provide a continuous record for the occupational therapist to monitor and review. Her ultimate goal is to facilitate students’ improved awareness of their body position and handwriting pressure, so that they can learn to self-correct when in the classroom.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Inputs
A. Foot switches. Two soft switches are placed under the student’s feet when the student is comfortably seated. Students are more likely to sit in an upright and supported position when both feet are properly aligned and placed firmly on the floor.

B. Pressure sensing clipboard. The student places paper on a clipboard that contains a grid of force sensing resistors.

C. Sensor for non-dominant hand. The student places this sensor on the clipboard and underneath his or her non-dominant hand. This encourages the student to use the non-dominant hand to help with stability and improves the reliability of the computer’s pressure sensing.

Outputs
D. Light indicators for students. If the student lifts a foot off of either foot switch, corresponding LEDs light up. If the student lifts the non-dominant hand from the sensor, a central LED lights up.

E. Audio feedback for students. If the student exceeds a threshhold handwriting pressure, a brief audio message is played. Students recorded their own voices for these messages.

F. Controls and graphical display for the occupational therapist. A Processing sketch provides simple controls and a continuous graphical display of the student‘s writing pressure.

To use the system, the student, with the help of the occupational therapist, sits in a comfortable and upright position and arranges the clipboard, foot sensors, and hand sensor. After a brief calibration to determine the student’s baseline handwriting pressure, the student writes while UpWrite monitors foot and hand position and pressure.

TESTING AND OBSERVATIONS
Student Response. Upon first using the system, students played with the LED and audio response, intentionally generating feedback. After several minutes of playing, most understood how UpWrite worked and were able to focus on writing tasks. When students received feedback, they interrupted their task, often laughing. They then adjusted their posture or grip and resumed writing with softer pressure. In some cases, students improved posture and pressure without any feedback; however, they did not seem to be aware of these improvements, saying that they always sat upright with both feet on the ground.

Although most students disliked writing tasks, they enjoyed using UpWrite. This may have simply been the novelty, but it is worth noting that most of Press‘s students dislike using any technologies that mark them as different. The use of standard writing equipment, incorporation of a computer, and their involvement in testing the system may have contributed to the positive response.

Future directions include more precise pressure sensing, improved user interface design for the ocupational therapist, and ideally longer term testing to evaluate UpWrite’s educational effectiveness.

The project was presented at the 2007 ITP spring show, and more documentation can be found on ITP's website.

The Photo-Silhouette Booth

2008-08-22T22:59:00.005+01:00

designed with Kate Monahan, Jeff Sable, and Scott Varland for Introduction to Physical Computing

The photo-silhouette booth was conceived as a redesign of a traditional photo booth. We wanted to address some of the problems we saw with photo booths (predominantly awkward timing and self-consciousness during the experience and in the resulting photos) while maintaining key aspects of their appeal (including a sense of performance and play, a tension between public and private space, and the production of high quality portraits against a clean background).

To that end, we built a booth that captured users’ images in two ways:

A silhouetted video image of the user was projected onto the front of the booth. Throughout the 30 seconds of use, a series of elements (such as butterflies and balloons) moved across the screen and reacted in different ways to the users’ silhouette.
Three times during the interaction, a digital camera snapped a picture of the user. These photographs were taken shortly after the introduction of a new screen element and without any in-the-moment warning. (Since we lacked the resources to print out all the photos) the captured images were saved to a computer and displayed in a slide show on a nearby monitor.

At first glance, the photo booth was a simple video mirror like many a video mirror made for the last 30-odd years—and compressed into a 30 second interaction. The interesting part only became apparent after a user saw the photographs and realized that the video mirror had simply been serving as a distraction and an impetus to movement. The photographs generally showed people in motion,* engaged in what they were doing—and decidedly not standing there being painfully aware of having their picture taken.

Like a standard photo booth, the primary output was a brief series of photographs. The technology was simply a method to encourage some behaviors and avoid others—all directed to improve the final off-screen output.

There’s endless documentation of this project. A web page with more images is here, and our blog recap (including a host of technical details) is here. The photo booth was displayed at the ITP 2006 winter show and on the ITP floor for the spring semester of 2007.

* This project was my first experience with a problem I keep running into when working with screen displays as avenues for on-the-fly choreography—-people look at the screen, rather than at each other or out at an audience. There’s also a certain ‘vocabulary’ of movement people tend to default to—i.e., with many video mirrors, people tend to wave their arms about. Sometimes this is a problem, but sometimes it is the issue itself—how do we tend to move in response to digital messages, and what does that say about the design and its messages, about the people using a system, or about possibilities for interaction that remain unexplored?