Simulating History Research Lab

The Simulating History project folks at Brock University’s Centre for Digital Humanities, with whom I do my games-based research,  have released a nice little video about the Lab:

Dodging Bullets in Presentations

I love the circularity of the internet sometimes. My post on Flypaper got picked up by an automatic blog aggregator, and was put on “Hey Jude” under a posting on ‘The Problem With Powerpoint’. Somebody clicked on that, and wordpress stats told me about it. So I went to the post, and lo! there was this extremely well done powerpoint on ‘Dodging Bullets in Presentations’ by Rowan Manahan. Whether you use Flypaper, Powerpoint, or something else, the lessons here are extremely good. Maybe all conference presenters should view this one before they do their papers…! I know I’ve been guilty by times…

VastPark Stress Test

It’s been a virtual morning. Just participated in the VastPark stress test. VastPark is a nascent virtual worlds platform - according to their material,

VastPark is an end-to-end solution for creating, deploying and distributing virtual experiences on the web. It’s composed of a new breed of applications, designed to make creating these experiences simpler and faster, with a more immersive result. We call this the era of the virtual web.

Powered by open specifications

VastPark is powered by some exciting new specifications that have been developed to fulfill two of the layers in this virtual web; MetaWSS for content distribution and IMML for content presentation

Read more about how VastPark is working to standardise the virtual web.

So I downloaded the alpha browser, and logged in.

The point of view was first person, mouse controls and keyboard controls for moving around. There’s a chat window in the right… felt a bit like one of those VRML type sites. I couldn’t connect using my poor old Toshiba laptop, but my desktop graphics card was up to the task, and connection was achieved in 5 seconds, throwing me in-world. The first world worked fine enough, second one I tried caused it to freeze up (but that may have been because the test ended right about the same time). Now, I realise that this is the alpha build, and that this was a stress test, so one shouldn’t expect too much, yet (I was annoyed the way the browser grabbed my mouse, and wouldn’t let me leave the world pane of the browser. Turns out you have to hit the secret key to get it to release). They’ve already made all of their tools available, even at this early stage, so that’s something to be commended! Check ‘em out, see what you think. Full features list here.

AutoCad into Unreal2

Just had an interesting conversation with Joe Rigby, of MellaniuM Design

He was showing me a plugin that they’ve developed for exporting AutoCad models into the Unreal2 engine, and then scaling the textures back onto the model (usually, one would use something like 3d Studio Max or Maya to import models into Unreal2). From an archaeological point of view, archaeologists have been using AutoCad for years to create reconstructions of sites. To get those models into a world engine usually’d involve all sorts of translations, but if you could import directly from your existing archaeological AutoCad model…. you’d suddenly be able to experience the space that you’ve recreated. A 3d picture is still just a picture. Experiencing the space makes - as it were - a world of difference. Read Diane Favro or Kevin Lynch for a start on the importance of experiencing space.

In the demo Joe showed me, he walked his avatar around several architectural reconstructions (houses, etc), into a large art gallery / museum (pictures on the wall never pixellated, which was nice), and by their reconstruction of the Titanic. All the textures were very photorealistic, at least as good if not better than anything I’ve seen in SL. This being Unreal2, he had to turn off the weapons, etc, but he did show a novel use of the sniper-scope feature, zooming in on the detail of his model. Unreal2 brings people into the world via a peer-to-peer system, so allowing at least 30 odd if not more people to experience the same space at once: certainly enough for that class trip!

Joe’s interested to hear from any archaeologists who’re interested in exploring this technology, perhaps for some joint projects. I’d send him what I had, just to see what would happen, except I don’t have any AutoCad models lying about!

The Year of the Four Emperors mod for Civ IV

This little video records some of the game play in ‘The Year of the Four Emperors’ mod for Civ IV that I’ve used from time to time in my teaching. Things to watch for - the opening shows how to load the mod and get it running; ‘research’ can’t be turned off in the game, but you can make it impossible to carry out (’gunpowder’ for some reason is on the list- but it’ll take ca 2600 turns to do it, by which time the game has ended); the senate takes a vote on declaring one of the contenders Emperor; towns and military units are more or less in their correct historic positions.

Online learning in SL & RWU

Here’s a short video clip I made mostly to figure out how to do it. It shows a one-on-one tutorial going on inside Second Life, at RWU’s virtual campus. The last section of the film features a field trip to Catal Hoyuk, as reconstructed by the ‘Remixing Catalhoyuk‘ team at Okapi Island. Where else but in Second Life can you begin with a language tutorial, move on to intro to archaeology, and finish up by exploring an ancient settlement, while sitting in your slippers drinking coffee?

Interactive Fiction, Passively

PMOG:The Passively Multiplayer Online Game

An interesting feature of Pmog ‘missions’ is the way that so many of them are really guided tours of specialty websites (e.g. this one). This is a handy approach if, say, you teach via distance and you want to show your students what constitutes ‘good’ research sites.

Yet, that’s really nothing a powerpoint couldn’t already do. An interesting variant on these missions is the ‘puzzle’ mission, where creators exploit a glitch in the game to create breaks in the flow of the mission. The only way to progress is to solve the riddle to learn what website to go to next - whereupon the mission resumes.  Some of these, like ‘The Mystery Machine‘, require you to read the page to fill in the blanks: each word represents a letter in an ultimate URL. If you’ve got the right letters and you complete the last URL, the resulting webpage represents the ‘Victory!’ screen.  Others are more complex, more devious. My own mission, ‘The Case of the Missing … Something” depends on anagrams of URLs (which is mean, I know). I can’t solve ‘The Lost Gold of Dr. Nes‘, since it depends on a gamer’s knowledge of nintendo, but the principle is good.  ‘Meet Felix Klein‘ takes the player on a tour through various flickr photographs to create a kind of visual story. No puzzle, but it certainly *feels* like an old-style text adventure.

All of these represent a new twist on “interactive fiction”, with the fiction layered on top of the day-to-day internet (perhaps a riff on augment reality, too?).  In a way, they are like the ‘Prisoner Escape from the Tower of London‘ game created by mscape: the fiction intersects with daily life to create the game, with events being triggered by your physical or virtual location in the game space. Unlike regular interactive fiction, the game creator does not control that game space - other people intrude (in Pmog, other players might lay, for reasons unrelated to the mission you happen to be on, mines or portals on pages within a mission, which could -perhaps- prevent you from completing it).

The archaeological angle: simple show and tell of vetted sites is good, for starters. Using Pmog (or other AR) to create layers of information/meaning on top of the information is even better. You could imagine a student creating a pmog mission on curse-tablets. This might begin as simple show and tell. Other students could then play the mission, leaving mines on pages they think are ‘bad’ (poor information, bad research, whatever) or portals to ‘good’ sites… the game records the play, and the meta-analysis afterwards with the prof would spark a deeper discussion. Inserting puzzles into the mission would force a deeper engagement still, and completing a puzzle mission would constitute a formative assessment exercise.  Creating missions could also be exercises in public archaeology for the students,  if built around a decent resource (say the British Museum, or Chaco Canyon).

What I’m arguing for is that we, as educators, need to be using things like Pmog to get our students to engage with online materials in a deeper fashion. They are too often uncritical users of what they find. They need to interact passively.

birthing pmog

For the interested, here’s a long discussion of the genesis and thinking behind Pmog from Terranova.

PMOG mission

I’ve been away from PMOG for a while - they were having some teething problems as they updated bits and pieces of their system. I’d been trying to make a mission built around the Great Canadian Mysteries website, similar to the first one I made, ‘Awwww, Sir, how can I find out anything about THAT?‘. Anyway, I got frazzled, and left it alone for a while (everything kept crashing on me). Took a peek at PMOG today, and things seem to be running well again, a bit nicer layout and so on. So I’ll try again…

Meantime, here’s the opening blurb from the mission, where ‘the Professor’ takes a student by the hand, and sets them off on a quest to find proper research materials…

“”How in the world can I find sources on the motivations of ancient Olympic athletes?? Maybe if you told me what to read, then I could answer the question.” read the email. The prof looked away from his computer, groaning inwardly. And no doubt, just parrot back to me a webpage, he thought. Why do students expect to be spoon-fed everything?

“Follow me. First, let us search ‘ancient olympics’ properly. Where would you go first, O student at the University of Manitoba with its excellent library resources?’ “

(Nb, I’m not that snide with students. Dramatis personae, and all that…)

In setting up the mission, I left ‘mines’ and other booby-traps at places where students typically go that are emphatically NOT good research sources (but students nevertheless find with dismaying regularity). They’ve since all been tripped, so I’ll have to go lay some more. Some feedback from other Pmogeons:

	caggles (02 Apr 2008 16:25:2 I found it ^_^ Awesome quest. I like the idea behind it, the student doing a project. I can totally relate XD
	sarastani (19 Mar 2008 18:31:5 I found it! I found it! I like these missions. Good job Professor!
	chetyre (18 Mar 2008 04:12:14) Sorry, I’m just dense and didn’t figure out the last URL. Carry on…
	chetyre (18 Mar 2008 03:39:39) It broke for me on the Penn Museum page. Don’t know if it’s just me. Also, you might want to look out since “rrdreamer” is leaving mines on your pages
	azeo (17 Mar 2008 15:26:12) Hmm, am I detecting some work-related frustration?
	snocrsh (17 Mar 2008 14:56:4 Scholarly journals are made of academic win. It’s that simple!

(Not sure what that last comment actually means, but anyway…)

The one thing that prevents me from wholeheartedly embracing the concept of PMOG: what do they do with all of that data generated on browsing habits? Clearly, that’s information worth lots of $$$…

The most amazing game I’ve seen lately: Crayon Physics Deluxe

 

From Slate:

“Crayon Physics Deluxe lets you draw objects on the screen by clicking and dragging your mouse, or by drawing with the stylus of a tablet PC, as in this video. The objects you scrawl become part of the game world. The goal is to create objects that propel a crudely drawn ball toward a crudely drawn star. There is no single correct way to scoot that ball around; the fun is in exploring the options. Within seconds of hitting start, you’re furiously scribbling blocks and ramps and wedges and seesaws, whatever it takes to reach the goal. Some players may get sidetracked creating hilariously inefficient Rube Goldberg devices. Others will forget the objectives altogether and just draw. (If you want to try it yourself, you can download a simpler demo version of the game here.) “

The prototype of this game was built in under a week. The maker of this game, Petri Purho, is a 24 year old student. The man has talent! Also, as an archaeologist and educator, I was delighted to read the following:

“There are many games based on the exploits of Indiana Jones, but Purho’s version is the only one that tells the story from the boulder’s point of view, letting players control the rampaging sphere and smoosh wave after wave of attacking archeologists. Another game, Grammar Nazi, is a literate twist on shooters like Space Invaders. Players fire upward at swarms of enemies, but the ammo in Purho’s version is the letters you type on the keyboard, and the longer the words you spell, the more damage they do. (Tapping out indie has some impact. Autodidact causes a massive explosion.) Purho made it in a single day. “

Be the boulder. Oh yeaaah….