Wednesday night I went to my first real game industry event, a local chapter “mixer” for the International Game Developers Association. For being there only a couple of hours, I learned a great deal about the local industry. First, there almost isn’t one; it’s not cost-effective to retain game design staff at New York metro area prices. Second, while the locals in the biz are pretty solidly male and well-educated, they are also more racially diverse than I might have expected.
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After a WGBH tour a year ago I have eagerly been following the progress of Postcards from Buster, a spinoff of the popular Arthur franchise which sends bunny Buster around the United States to visit kids in a range of communities. He meets gospel singers, Mormons, rock climbers, Eskimos, cowgirls, all kinds of people. If any show is likely to make American kids more familiar with their diverse neighbors, this is it.
So it was much to my chagrin to learn that PBS yanked the entire run of the show (it’s worth watching the largish video clip there) due to a U.S. Department of Education complaint (and threat to withhold future funding). Why? The show’s run included an episode featuring a family in Vermont headed by a lesbian couple. Thank god for WGBH, which continued to broadcast the show anyway and distributed it to every interested station (including WNET in New York, where I caught an episode earlier this week). This is really outrageous, and anyone who agrees should write to margaret.spellings@ed.gov, the woman at USDOE who complained. Be aware that this skirmish renews the threat to Sesame Street and other shows which perenially comes up during eras of Republican congressional dominance. (Thanks to my CCTE colleagues for picking this one up.)
Finally it can be shown! The videos of Grover demonstrating the difference between epistemologically NEAR and epistemologically FAR, and the video of our successful hacking of the player piano at a hotel (it plays the Super Mario Bros. theme — note both links will load Quicktime video) are up, and I finally have the links and a blog to put them on. There are also more pictures from last autumn and the conference I presented at in Texas. Thanks to Jon C. Dude, the Australians are so much cooler than we are.
Man, the way you know it’s been eons since I’ve posted on my own blog when I haven’t posted anything yet about my deep and abiding love for KATAMARI DAMACY. Synopsis of game: You are the prince of the cosmos, your father is the king, and he’s a self-centered lush and went on a drunken spree and smashed up all the stars. He tells you that because of filial piety it is your job to replace the stars. The way you will do this is by rolling everything in the world, from thumbtacks on up to football stadiums, into balls and send them into space. To reiterate: The game mechanic is ROLLING THINGS INTO A BALL. This is controlled only with TWO ANALOG JOYSTICKS, possibly the simplest interface ever on these newfangled controllers the kids use today. The music sounds like Pizzicato Five had international digital babies, the visuals look like the Beatles made a game out of Yellow Submarine, your cosmic daddy has a triangular orange nose and a huge purple codpiece, and the name of the game means CLUMP OF SOULS in Japanese. You will especially want to see the online guide, which is funny even if you don’t get a chance to play the game — possibly the funniest guide to a game since Burning Monkey Solitaire‘s. It costs ONLY TWENTY DOLLARS, so you will go out and buy it RIGHT NOW. You will most likely also want the sequel, which will be out later this year (at least in Japan). I cannot stress this enough.
Also on the list of games I’ve been obsessed with lately is Vib Ribbon, which I have yet to get my hands on. Been around for about five years, apparently developed by the lovely folks what brought you Parappa the Rapper. Develops each game stage based on the music playing, including your own CDs. Must find this one… the first track on the game’s soundtrack is called “Polaroid,” and samples the sound of an old camera spitting out its film. The soundtrack itself would be more listenable in its own right if it didn’t speed up and slow down a lot, but it’s still unearthly good.
I’m reading an article today by John Bransford and Kathleen Nitsch — cognitive scientists — which details the ways in which subjects in linguistic experiments understand sentences they are asked to process, and how this differs from the ways in which we understand sentences in everyday life.
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