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Serious Games (No, Really)

http://seriousgames.msu.edu/analyses/sherloc6/analysis2/index.html

Disaffected! is a serious game developed and produced by Persuasive Games, a company co-founded by Ian Bogost and Gerard LaFond that creates "electronic games for persuasion, instruction, and activism" ("Persuasive Games"). The Disaffected! homepage links to downloadable versions for both Windows and Mac OS X. Ian Bogost is also associated with Water Cooler Games, a research blog about serious games.

I love the whole idea of using videogames to accomplish something beyond entertainment, especially something about social consciousness raising. Go Ian and Gerard!

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New media and video game activism at the New Frontier exhibit

[Above: Stills from two critical video games by Molleindustria: "Oiligarchy" and "The McDonald's game."]

Woo hoo! The Sundance Film Festival is getting frisky! They've included non-film art — new media video work and video game art, to be particular — in this year's festival and, Holy Moses, there's some amazing things going on. The exhibit, entitled New Frontier, is on display at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art through May 19.

Excellent large scale data visualizations about wildlife encroachment, a participatory Kinect piece about a disaster at a Los Angeles food bank, a 3-D celebration (sort of) of aggression in Hollywood, people raging at their computers, and video games that you always lose no matter what. It's all from what you might call "the art of discomfort" but it's amazing.

I'm so glad to see this in Salt Lake City!

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My Arduino goes blink, blink, blink!

This was a long time coming for such a minor accomplishment but I'm thrilled nonetheless. I have successfully gotten my Arduino Uno board out of the box (about a year after I bought it), hooked up to my Mac (with my fancy, clear USB cable that I stole from my Blue Snowball microphone), and — lo and behold! — it's blinking. It's alive! Woo hoo!

Next up: Actual programming.

Completed:

  • Getting Started with Arduino, Ch. 3: The Arduino Platform (1 exercise)

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Bart Discovers Machinima

[Above: Still from From “Dear Fairy” by Tom Jantol aka Madame Zhora. In this short film, Pinocchio wants to be a wooden toy again. See it on YouTube.]

Oh, my, it turns out that there's yet another Brave New World out there. I just found out about "machinima" (a concatenation of "Machine" and "Cinema," as you might have guessed), which is basically movies made with video game software. It's a way to get 3D animation without actually having to be able to animate. Fascinating. While machinima apparently has its roots in first-person shooter games like Doom, where gamers would record the action to show how quickly they could get through a level, people soon found they could write their own scripts and action. The comic series "Red vs. Blue," which uses characters from Halo, is a good example of such adaptation.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell, there are a couple of video games that seem almost created for machinima, the most familiar of which is Second Life. It looks like there are entire (online) film festivals dedicated to Second Life machinima, such as the Ma Machinima International Festival. Also, a quick Google search for "Second Life" Machinima reveals a number of tutorials and videos on how to get started.

But it's even easier in the simulation game The Movies, which really was created for making movies. I even got a (miniscule) book on how to do this called Machinima: How you can use The Movies to produce your own animated films by David Mark. I've installed the game on both of our MacBooks so my son Quinn can hack-and-slash at it on one while I go through my overly-methodical, start-at-the-beginning approach on the other.

Anyhow, it's a fascinating discovery for me. I can't wait to see what I can do with it. I'll let you know.

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Max Miscellanea #1

Just a couple of silly things that I tried after watching some videos by the creators of Max, Cycling '74. These were posted on YouTube under their "Did You Know" series, although I'm linking them in to my YouTube account as I watch each one. The first is a little bon bon for us nice and orderly types and the second is frivolous, although it does have some more useful application, which may come up later.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt8wNbY4ulg]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od6LSUtyOcc]

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MMJ4M 02: Generating Music

"Random Atonal Trash," or RAT, is the term that VJ Manzo uses for the Max patches in Chapter 2 of his book Max/MSP/Jitter for Music. What that means is that tones are generated using random numbers. There are several variations on the patch, including a few with sliders for duration and tone. The next few patches seem to require an actual keyboard, which I don't have, so we'll see what happens.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DifbYGDOmg]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eelvfHgZrpE]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT2QkhK-xb4]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooeO186zhXY]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mROX-Yb3nBA]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKFE_oPer9o]

And, happily, I just came across another blog that is working through VJ Manzo's Max book: mikecrane.wordpress.com. I'll link his stuff as often as I can.

Completed:

  • Max/MSP/Jitter for Music, Ch. 2: Generating Music (first part) (6 exercises)
  • Patches can be downloaded from http://db.tt/GBYLb0vY (Dead Link)
  • UPDATED LINK: Patches can now be downloaded from http://j.mp/1iy19Xl
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Film School Advice for Data Analysts

 

I just finished reading Neil Landau and Matthew Frederick's delightful little book, 101 Things I Learned in Film School. (It's part of an entire series of books that started with Frederick's own 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, of which more will be said at a later date. The other titles address fashion school, culinary school, and business school. I will address these, too, at later dates.) What's most interesting about this book is not that plan on going to film school or working with film as such but that I can see at least some connection between many of the ideas in the book and my own goal of data analysis (believe it or not). The idea is this: when you analyze data, you are telling a story, and stories can be told in ways that are more or less interesting, informative, or effective. Inasmuch as cinema also tells stories, some of the principle carry over. For example:

  • 10: Make Psychology Visual. That is, by changing camera angles and distance, different meanings can be ascribed to a scene. The same is true for designing visualizations (I imagine).
  • 14: Beginning, Middle, End. That is, there is a comfortable narrative structure to a film, and that structure can be repeated at smaller scales. Although visualizations are typically presented as static images, they can still present a form of narrative. This is especially true for those gigantic, long infographics you'll see. And it is certainly true for any video-based visualization (and maybe there should be more of those).
  • 22: Plot is physical events; story is emotional events. Data analysis is more than just presenting bits of information (i.e., the physical events). It is an exercise in meaning-making through the interpretation and application of insights derived from analysis (akin to the "emotional" component of the story).
  • 64: Dig Deeper. "Do fewer things, but do them better." In analysis, rather than presenting as many factoids as possible, it is better to understand the distinctive characteristics of the nature, such as why there are outliers on a particular variable, why a scatterplot is curved instead of straight, and why the wording of two similar questions gives different answers.
  • 93: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It's very easy and very tempting to add more charts, more variables, more tables, more stuff to an analysis. But people have a limited attention span and the analysis is often understood in a heuristic fashion anyhow, so it's much better to limit oneself to the minimum amount of analysis that will give a valid and useful conclusion.

So, it may be a bit of a stretch, but that's actually what I had in mind when I was reading this fine book and the other ones in the series. Inspiration is everywhere.

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Bouncing off the Walls

In the second group of exercises from Daniel Shiffman's book Learning Processing, the topics covered include basic rollovers, toggles, movement from edge to edge, and simulated gravity. I have to admit that it took me about two hours to work through a bizarre little kink in the synthetic gravity part, where the objects would fall down and sometimes just quiver on the floor. Not what I was looking for. I think I solved it. Maybe. I think that the most interesting effects, though, are the ones involving semi-transparent circles leaving traces on the screen. Ooooooohhhh, wow... In any case, here are a few more screenshots and videos.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N1TbVZd8Zw]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t72Hpgu61aY]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUJRu0Yawng]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCeRsObSiDU]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIss4Fn9YPc]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGl0-qDx4X0]

Completed:

  • Learning Processing, Ch. 05: Conditionals (6 exercises)

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Back to the Basics with "Learning Processing"

I decided that before I got too much further in Ben Fry's rather-advanced book Visualizing Data I would do well to go back through Daniel Shiffman's introductory-intermediate-advanced book Learning Processing. So, in a sense I'm starting from square one again, as I'm doing every coding exercise in the book from  the beginning. But it's always nice to have a firm foundation, isn't it?

So, here's the first batch of sketches. In the book, Shiffman recommends that one create a basic shape to elaborate upon as one learns new material. He made a simple alien that he calls Zoog. I decided to make a stick-figure dancer. (In Getting Started with Processing by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, they use P5, the Processing Robot as the running example.) I have still images in the gallery above. The first two are inherently static, the second two are screenshots from a dynamic sketch. Videos of the sketches in action are below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIL4OBD74mo]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez7iKklydgY]

Completed:

  • Learning Processing, Ch. 00: Preface (0 exercises)
  • Learning Processing, Ch. 01: Pixels (1 exercise)
  • Learning Processing, Ch. 02: Processing (1 exercise)
  • Learning Processing, Ch. 03: Interaction (2 exercises)
  • Learning Processing, Ch. 04: Variables (1 exercise)
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Getting It All on Video

I'm planning on creating a whole bunch of things on my computer that can't be adequately represented with screenshots. (I will, however, still include those as often as possible.) As such, I thought it would be nice to upload some small videos so my professors could see what I'm up to. I already have a YouTube channel at youtube.com/bartonpoulson but that functions primarily for my statistics tutorials (which are doing very nicely, thank you) and I didn't want to mix these up with those.

At first I thought I'd try posting my artsy videos on the extra artsy Vimeo service. But then everything got very, very complicated. Vimeo wanted money, they wanted me to wait 30 minutes to see my 30 second clip, and so on. Then I thought I would try WordPress' own service, VideoPress. But that, too, looked like it would be expensive and cumbersome.

Then I found out that I could simply embed the URLs from YouTube. Quick, easy, and free. As Yul Brenner, as Pharoah, was wont to say: "So let it be written, so let it be done."

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More Than a Straight Line This Time

When I last posted on my work with Ben Fry's excellent book Visualizing Data, I posted all of two drawings, both of which were made with straight lines. Well, Chapter 3, "Mapping," does a heck of a lot more than that. It took me two days to get through this chapter (as opposed to 1:48 — I timed it — for Chapter 2). It was working on an interactive map of the US. Anyhow, the gallery above contains the many version of the sketches I did while following along with the examples. The still photos do not demonstrate the interactive, changing nature of several of these sketches, I've embedded a YouTube video below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bm6nhZYW1o]

In the meantime, I think I need to go back to Daniel Shiffman's fabulous book Learning Processing to get up to speed on some of the intermediate stuff first.

Completed:

  • Visualizing Data, Ch. 3: Mapping (17 exercises)

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Finally Launchpad Makes Sense

So when Steve Jobs gave a preview of Lion (AKA Mac OS X 10.7) he talked all about how they were bringing features from the iPhone "back to the Mac." One of these was the icon screen, which on the Mac is called Launchpad. All I can remember is that when I first installed Lion and looked at Launchpad, it was an irretrievable mess, so I tried to forget that it existed.

Then, I decided to do a total wipe of my hard drive and start all over. (This was motivated by the fact that sometimes my computer would get stuck and just hang on processes that shouldn't have been a problem.) But this time I installed my apps very selectively and in order. I then cleaned up Launchpad as things came in. And now, it's so lovely and wonderful that I just can't stand it!

Also, I had to deal with my desire to categorize everything. In this case, I tried organizing the games (which I basically never play) in several ways, until finally I decided that they didn't have to get categorized at all but could just have their own pages and be in alphabetical order. Ahhhhh....

Anyhow, I'm so happy with it I thought I'd post a few pictures.

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Game Promotions Gone Wrong

In my Intro to Video Games class yesterday, there was a (very) brief discussion of the game Bioshock and the scary bunny faces that appear in it. This reminded me of some lovely cartoons that got sent my way a while ago. They depict a series of “unused game promotions” that coulda, shoulda, woulda been. Then again, maybe not....

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Arduino, Ardweeny, Aardvark...

To round out my set of current independent studies projects (as the Jitter project has to wait until later in the semester), here's my initial report on my experiments with the Arduino circuit board, as supervised by University of Utah Sculpture professor Paul Stout. (Hi, Paul!) For this course I'm going to go through the little book Getting Started with Arduino (second edition) by co-founder Massimo Banzi. This one's going to be a little trickier because I have to actually make things. (I've got my set of parts and some tools but I still need to get a soldering iron ASAP.)

One of the things I loved as I started re-reading this book (as I already read the first edition all the way through) is that Massimo refers to a modular circuit set by Industrial Design great Dieter Rams. I found the Lectron set that he mentioned online at a page celebrating Dieter's work called Das Programm. Neat!

I also found some other great resources for learning Arduino, such as the Arduino Playground, an Arduino category at Instructables, and a similar category at the fabulous Makezine site. (And, by the way, the "Ardweeny" from this post's title is an actual product, just a tiny circuit board.) Lots of good things in store!

Completed:

  • Getting Started with Arduino, Ch. 0: Preface (0 exercises)
  • Getting Started with Arduino, Ch. 1: Introduction (0 exercises)
  • Getting Started with Arduino, Ch. 2: The Arduino Way (0 exercises)

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Kulture with a Kapital "K"

So Grandma Jacque gave my two girls (Zoë, 9, and Talia, 7) a bottle of glow-in-the-dark nail polish. It turns out that my wife, Jacque (>9), put some on, too. (Picture above is for representational purposes only; not her real nails.) The best part, though, is that Zoë apparently ran around in the dark with just two fingers in front of her mouth singing "All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth..." Performance art at its best!

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MMJ4M 01: Introduction to Programming

In my previous post I reported on my independent study project with Processing. Now I'll report on a second project, this one using the visual programming environment Max/MSP by Cycling '74. (This project is being supervised by Music Professor Miguel Chuaqui, who, according to the map on the Cycling '74 site, is the only person in the state of Utah who teaches Max/MSP.)

Anyhow, I'm using a lovely book entitled Max/MSP/Jitter for Music by VJ Manzo, who looks much more like a wild man rocker than someone who would write clean, crisp prose about programming (good for you!). I started reading this book back in November. I posted on it previously but now I'm ready to put up pictures of all of my patches, as the programs are called. So, the gallery at the top of this post includes the five patches from Chapter 1 and the videos below show them in action.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBibJQ9P-O8]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmQ9KvW3XY0]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhwFuJ9rA_M]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf06H2okJpM]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbULftURhiE]

(I've also come across a blog with a total of nine entries from 2009 called "Learning Max/MSP: Using Max/MSP for a Generative Music Burning Man Project." Excellent!)

Completed:

  • Max/MSP/Jitter for Music, Ch. 0: Preface (0 exercises)
  • Max/MSP/Jitter for Music, Ch. 1: Introduction to Programming (5 exercises)
  • Patches can be downloaded from http://db.tt/GBYLb0vY (Dead Link)
  • UPDATED LINK: Patches can now be downloaded from http://j.mp/1iy19Xl

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"Visualizing Data" for Real Now

As part of my independent studies projects this semester (of which there are four), I'll be reporting on each step here on this blog. This is so my supervising professor — in this case, that's Photography professor Ed Bateman  (Hi, Ed!) — can see what I'm doing and grade my work accordingly. It's also to show my university that I did something useful for my sabbatical. Finally, it's to show something that may be of use to other people who are trying to learn the same things that I'm working on.

With that said, my first project centers on the wonderful programming environment Processing and the equally wonderful book Visualizing Data by Processing co-creator Ben Fry. (I bought this book a year and a half ago so it's time I actually did something with it....) This book and course of study are follow-ups to the introductory course on Processing that I taught last semester at the University of Utah using the much shorter book Getting Started with Processing, also by Ben Fry and the other Processing co-founder, Casey Reas.

(As an interesting note, part of what has finally gotten me around to doing this is the fact that I now have the book not only in print but in ebook format, which I read on my wonderful new Kindle Touch and on the Kindle software on my Mac. It beats Apple's iBook hands down. Also, I can have the book open on my MacBook's monitor and have all of the working material open on my big external monitor at the same time. I'm in paradise.)

Sooooo, for today, I went through the Preface and the first two chapters (for about the fourth time) and, to prove it, I've included screenshots of the two numbered examples in those chapters, which I've recreated by hand. Extremely basic but always so rewarding. I've also included a short video clip of the second one in action:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCCAjVb6nEg]

Completed:

  • Visualizing Data, Ch. 0: Preface (0 exercises)
  • Visualizing Data, Ch. 1: The Seven Stages of Visualizing Data (2 exercises)

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