Author Archives: SeanMcTex

More Good Thoughts on Games and Work

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I wrote a piece about a year ago called Workplace Motivation and Game Mechanics which summed up some of my ideas for bringing some of the compelling character of video games to the office. Since then, some much smarter people have been doing some thinking and experimenting with similar ideas.

Jane McGonigal gave a terrific talk at TED called “Gaming Can Make a Better World”. It’s well worth the 20 minutes it takes to watch:

Additionally, I’ve started reading Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete. It covers the authors’ experiences in this area, starting with poolside conversations and ending up with forming a company around these ideas. It’s a good read so far.

Based on these, it looks like the invasion of games into the workplace has the potential to create some important productivity gains and is already underway. It should be fun to see what the next decade brings.

Brief Thoughts on the iPad

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I’ve had intermittent access to an iPad for about two weeks now through work, and finally feel like I have a grasp on what it is, what it’s good at, and what it lacks.

First off, the iPad doesn’t do everything. It’s not a full-on replacement for a computer. In fact, you can’t even get it running without a computer to which you can connect it. It lacks a camera, so you can’t use it for videoconferencing or photography. While it’s better for content creation than the iPhone, thanks largely to its bigger screen and support for Bluetooth keyboards, it includes no facilities for printing out the content you do create. For that, again, you’ll have to rely on a computer.

That said, it does 90% of what people use a laptop for, and does that 90% beautifully. Web surfing is a smooth, fast delight. Dealing with email goes smoothly and quickly. The Calendar and Map applications are lovely to look at, and a pleasure to use. Listening to audio and watching video, while hampered a bit by the monophonic built-in speaker, is likewise a pleasure. The vibrant high-resolution screen makes it great for showing off photography. (In fact, I’ve already heard of a graphic designer friend-of-a-friend who got a job because he’d loaded up his portfolio onto the iPad to show it off.) Writing works great, especially with a hardware keyboard. And of course, there are a wealth of applications designed for the platform that make it even more versatile and capable.

Is it for the person who likes to tinker with computers? Probably not so much. Apple takes great pains to keep the iPad and its related platforms, like the iPhone and iPod Touch, locked down and controlled. On the other hand, this is a device I could give my Mom and expect her to actually use it. If one wants to do the things the iPad does, there’s not much way to do those things better, faster, or more intuitively.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-20

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  • Date night. While driving, the power steering went out, followed by overheating and power loss. This may be the van's last night. #fb #
  • Looks like the van is a goner. We'll archive the bumper stickers in some way. (Emily is *strongly* against stickers on the new van.) #fb #
  • At the Pat Metheny Orchestrion show at the Paramount in Austin. Eine Kleine Nerdmusik! #fb #
  • Watching first Doctor Who of new season. High hopes for Moffat. Aiee! They changed the theme music! #fb #
  • http://twitpic.com/1gcw29 – Replacement van purchased. 91 Villager nice condition low-ish miles. Yay! #
  • http://twitpic.com/1godpo – New front porch swing successfully installed! #
  • Really enjoying the heck out of reading the Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz series aloud to the family. Wonderfully fun stuff. #fb #
  • http://twitpic.com/1h2kd1 – Interesting bit of poetry all up the Alkek library steps this morning. #

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Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion Project

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Kathy and I attended the Pat Metheny show in Austin last night. We’d never gotten to see him before, and were familiar with very little of his music, but I was crazy to see this show once Barry Brake brought it to our attention. Why? The Orchestrion!

What is the Orchestrion? It’s a huge assemblage of instruments played by mechanical means — a player piano taken to crazy extremes. I’ve long been interested in non-traditional instruments and especially ones that are driven by electronics and machines, so this show was irresistible to me.

The performance was amazing. Metheny’s virtuosity on a guitar, both the normal version and the various “enhanced” ones he played over the course of the evening, was remarkable. The mechanical instruments were varied, beautiful, and fascinating, and a pleasure to watch and try to figure out how he controlled them. The only downside? It turns out that neither of us particularly like Metheny’s music.

But first things first. The instruments — my goodness, the instruments! He opened with a hihat with two solenoid-driven drumsticks playing it, as well as a set of finger cymbals mounted on a similar actuator. He also had some very cool four-stringed instruments with robot “fingers” that rolled rapidly up and down the strings and revolving plectrums that set the strings vibrating. There was a big marimba on each side of the stage with a mallet for every bar that played under computer control as well.

After a few pieces with these instruments, he pulled up a curtain to reveal the rest of the Orchestrion. My first impression was that some enterprising high school biology student had taken a scalpel to Neal Peart’s drum kit, carefully dissected it, and then neatly pinned all its component bits to the wall. There was also a cabinet filled with jars containing varying amounts of water to produce different pitches when air was blown across the top, a bass and guitar that looked like they had been assimilated by the Borg, and a big collection of hand percussion being shaken by mechanical poltergeists. When they all got going at once (which they often did), it made for some wonderful mechanical musical madness!

Unfortunately, Metheny plays a flavor of music that, while technically amazing and probably fascinating to modern Jazz fans, didn’t do much for either of us. Melodies were rare, harmonic progressions often seemed a bit directionless, and we were left feeling a bit adrift in a sea of high-speed improvisations. We were, however, clearly in the minority, as the crowd was hugely enthusiastic and provided several standing ovations over the course of the evening.

But in spite of that, we found the show fascinating, enjoyed getting to see the Paramount for the first time, and had a great evening together.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-13

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  • http://twitpic.com/1dq943 – Landa Park and Friesenhaus date night. #
  • Well, according to this morning's doctor, Dad gets another six weeks with the cast and wheelchair. Rats. #fb #
  • http://twitpic.com/1ebgtk – Work is getting a bit silly today. #
  • Fun day at the river with some of our UK relatives! Passed pot smokers, a wedding, live country music, and hundreds of kayaks. #fb #
  • Why isn't this iPad lending immense richness and meaning to my existence? I think it must be broken. #fb #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-06

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On My Mind: Tech, Crisis Response, Maps, Crowd-Sourcing

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I’ve been having some interesting talks with my friend Ben Mengden lately. He graduated with a Geography degree, has been delving into architecture over the past few years, and is really interested in the developing world and how those disciplines can be applied there. I have a deeply rooted interest in computing, the Internet, and how new technology can be applied to and change our lives for the better. Lately, our fields of study have started overlapping in some really interesting ways.

I love Wikipedia. As Clay Shirky discusses in his fascinating book Here Comes Everybody, sites like Wikipedia harness the power of tens of thousands of people willing to spend 5 minutes to improve something. There aren’t many people who will write an exhaustive article on a subject. There are, however, plenty of people who will be happy to add a sentence or two, contribute a photo, or exercise their pedantic tendencies and fix a bit of grammar. As a result, Wikipedia, while not academically authoritative, has a body of knowledge that is vast, immensely useful, surprisingly well-referenced, and pretty much unprecedented in human history.

Thus I was delighted to discover OpenStreetMap, an effort to bring that same community information-building ethos to mapping. After having been locked into the fixed, licensed data that MapQuest, Google Maps and Yahoo Maps provided, it was pretty amazing to be able to whack the “Edit” button and add speed limit data to my street, to remove roads and points of interest that weren’t accurate, and to make a note of the various playgrounds around town. When my wife and I went to Switzerland last year, we were able to load up our GPS with free OpenStreetMap data before we left, saving us a substantial sum.

But better than that, OpenStreetMap has been enabling people around the world to share geographic data in unprecedented ways. When the recent devastating earthquake struck Haiti, crisis response teams were able to collaborate with government agencies, volunteer translators and mapmakers around the world by using OpenStreetMap and other crowd-sourced crisis response systems like Ushahidi as clearinghouses for information on survivors, refugee camps, water supplies, road conditions, and more. (See this video for more details, or this one for details on how you can help map roads.)

In addition, Ben has been exploring Architecture for Humanity, a humanitarian organization dedicated to providing professional architectural design services to folks in need. They have created the Open Architecture Network, a service dedicated to open source architecture that allows architects and designers to share their plans and designs in CAD form over the Internet. Thus, builders helping to rebuild regions devastated by natural disasters now have access to a wealth of professionally designed building plans, and can even have custom plans created by an architect far from the site of the crisis. And get this: efforts are well underway to create gigantic 3D printers that can take plans and build a house from them automatically under computer control in a couple of days.

My wife laughs at my because I drive around with our GPS on even when I know where I’m going. “It makes me feel like I’m living in the Science Fiction future,” I tell her. But even more than having a robot voice tell me where to turn, being able to reach out across the Internet and help people half a world away makes me really excited to be living in this era of technological wonders.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-30

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  • Recreating my favorite breakfast as a teen: toast with cheese, bacon, and salsa. Still wonderful! (And oh, so healthy!) #fb #
  • http://twitpic.com/1bbl96 – Today's project: build picnic table from deck scrap. #
  • http://twitpic.com/1bd87m – Liam lends a hand. #
  • http://twitpic.com/1bddgc – Mission accomplished! It's no beauty but it keeps things off the ground! #
  • Cigarettes will kill you. Probably tonight. With a machete. #fb #

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A Few More Thoughts on GURPS

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About a week and a half ago, Abigail, Liam and I got together with their friends Ryan and Eleen, my cohort Jason Young, and my brother Chris for another round of GURPS, the tabletop roleplaying game we’ve been enjoying lately. I had been planning to run an adventure in a Science Fiction setting this time around, but time grew short, so I instead grabbed one of the free D&D modules that’s available on the internet and quickly adapted it. Science Fiction is still certainly in our future, but since I have to do more inventing for that, it’s going to take a while longer.

The session went well: I got to use the GM’s Screen I received for Christmas, the players got through a little bit more than I expected them to, and found the dungeon guardians less of a challenge than I’d thought they would, due mostly to Liam’s somewhat unbalanced combat specialist character. Kathy very graciously kept us all supplied with food and drinks throughout the 6 hour long play time.

One interesting thing I noticed this time around was the marked difference in how the younger folks and the adults approached the game. Jason was playing as Gront the Dwarf, who would be a familiar sort of figure for anyone who saw John Rhys-Davies’ version of Gimli. Chris’ character went by the nom de guerre Jimmy Softshoe, and had the interesting quirks that he only referred to himself in the third person and he hated poetry. Both of the adults really engaged with and enjoyed the role-playing aspects. Jimmy screamed in frustration when the party encountered a sphinx with rhyming riddles, and Gront gruffly exclaimed “no tossing the dwarf!” when the party faced a chasm they had to cross.

The kids, on the other hand, almost entirely ignored the role-playing aspects except when forced to deal with them. (Liam, for example, wasn’t allowed to participate in decision-making and problem solving because his character’s intelligence was too low.) They instead spent hours beforehand figuring out how they could use their allotted points to make their character the most effective fighter (in the case of the boys), or finding the perfect character portrait for their winged elf (the girls). Even after traversing a particularly tricky obstacle, Ryan asked me “Was there a better way to do it?” still apparently thinking about optimizing the game system rather than having successfully navigated an obstacle.

But regardless of the play style, everyone enjoyed the time a great deal. I really like the cooperative spirit that develops during these things, and look forward to our next session.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-23

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