Make Games for Yourself?

This is the first post in what will probably be a series of posts about a game I have been working on for the last couple of weeks. For any game designer game ideas always come faster than they can handle them. My problem is that the newest idea always seems like the best. My solid older ideas may be supplanted by newer shinier ones, and I'll never just stick with one and finish it. This idea, however, is an older one that keeps pushing the shiney new ones aside.

I am a tutor at the University of Michigan in Flint. I only tutor one subject; logic. Formal logic is a subject I am fascinated by not only as a student, and a computer scientist, but also as a game designer. It has so many applications to the things I am interested in, but the thing that keeps me coming back semester after semester is that it is like a game.

Propositional logic proofs (see the link!) are like sudoku or crossword puzzles to me. I enjoy "solving" them and helping other people figure out how to solve them. In the back of my mind, I've always thought that logical proofs could somehow make a good game, but I never went beyond the spark of an idea until recently.

Here's the game in a nutshell.

Components:

• Deck of 52 cards with Propositions on them ( P->Q, R v S, etc.)
• A dozen 6 sided dice for each player. 6 of the dice have letters P, Q, R, S, T, and a blank side. The other six have logical connectors [ v , -> , ~ , ( , & , = ]
• A smaller deck of cards for each player with each of the rules of inference on one side, and special rules on the back.

The Rules are (were) pretty straightforward. Draw some cards, put a card in play for everyone including yourself to use, and try and use the rest of your cards to prove another statement of your choosing. Any inference rules you use to make new propositions you form with the dice in front of you and you can use those to prove more stuff and get more points.

I ran through the game by myself a few times to make sure it worked and everything seemed to work out just fine. Only minor tweaks were needed before I thought I had a nice design. I just needed my buddy Toby to playtest with me to make sure it was ok.

Everything was most certainly not ok. The game didn't get past Toby's first turn because the level of complexity was such that no one who hadn't taken a semester of formal logic wouldn't even be able to understand what to do. I thought for sure my handy reference cards for the inference rules would be enough, but I had severely overestimated the time it takes to soak this stuff in. I had made an educational game that didn't teach anything but frustration. It was a total disaster of mental masturbation and lack of foresight.

I had made a game in which you use the rules you have learned rather than making a game where you learn the rules you will use. I got the whole thing backwards. So now it is back to the drawing board.

The plan from here on out is to have a progression through the game. I'll be adding a game board with two sides. One for beginning players and one for advanced players. You start off on one space on the board and that space will give you very simple instructions about what you need to do to advance to the next level. The game rules will unfold as you play and hopefully the level of complexity will melt into the playing of the game. On the back side of the game board, it will be assumed you're familiar with all the inference rules and it will be lot more difficult.

So now I've learned a very important lesson in game design. You can't always just make games for yourself, because sometimes you'll want someone else to play with.

Battlestar Galactica Play by Email Game part 1

I recently started running a play by email game of the Battlestar Galactica board game. I saw a lot of people running games on the penny arcade forums and thought it would be fun to run my own. I have owned the game for a few months now, and since I bought it have only had enough time to get together and play it a handful of times with my friends. I thought a Play by email game would be a perfect way to get some light gaming in and actually get some use out of my 50 dollar board game.

Light gaming? Maybe for the first 3 turns, but as you can see in the turn summary below, problems started early for the human fleet. There were cylons coming out of their ears. The entire first half of the game was plauged by cylon attacks and problems. The humans had to jump early to avoid massive amounts of civilian ship damage.

Now the game is well into the Sleeper Agent phase, and the game has turned to all out conspiracy. I never knew my friends could be so deceptive. I am impressed by their cunning and ability to lie through their teeth to each other.

I can't say much more about the game, because we are still in the middle of the whole thing and I don't want to give any secrets away to the players, but below is a turn by turn account of what is going on so far, minus all the intrigue (sorry!).

Turn 1 - Admiral Saul Tigh launches two vipers to counter the cylon threat, and sends a scout to nearby systems to look for water. The scout is successful and the Galactica is resupplied with food and water.

Turn 2 - Tom Zarek consolidates power by recruiting some engineers. Meanwhile the Jump Computer experiences minor difficulties. [Crisis: Jump Computer Failure]

Turn 3 - Helo, stranded on Caprica, must escape the radioactive Cylon infested wasteland. Admiral Tigh sends a rescue mission [Crisis: Rescue Mission] but Helo returns in critical medical condition

Turn 4 - Cheif launches 2 more vipers in preparation for the oncoming cylon raiding party [Crisis: Cylon Raiding Party].

Turn 5 - Boomer moves to weapons control and fires the Galactica's missiles at a basestar. Meanwhile, a full scale resistance is thwarted [Crisis: Resistance]

Turn 6 - Roslin gathers her favors in the military and has a cylon heavy raider destroyed. Luckily no civilians were harmed. Meanwhile, accusations fly on the Galactica [Crisis: Guilt by Collusion]

Turn 7 - Admiral Saul Tigh jumps the fleet to deep space to escape the cylon threat. [Crisis: Water Shortage]

Turn 8 - Zarek goes to the Galactica and visits the Research Lab. [Crisis: The Olympic Harrier] Meanwhile, a civilian ship is on a collision course with the galactica.

Turn 9 - Helo gets out of the sickbay, and goes immediately to the research lab. [Crisis: Water Shortage]

Turn 10 - The Chief goes to the research lab. There's a party in research! [Crisis: Crash Landing]

Turn 11 - Boomer launches a scout, but it is lost in deep space never to return! Meanwhile, the leadership decides to inform the public about the cylon threat. [Crisis: Informing the Public]

Turn 12 - Roslin uses her presidential power to gain favor with the council while the fleet notices a glitch in the network computers. [Crisis: Network Computers]

Turn 12 - Roslin uses her presidential power to gain favor with the council while the fleet notices a glitch in the network computers. [Crisis: Network Computers]

Turn 13 - Tigh is revealed as the cylon sympathizer and is sent to the brig, but the humans soon forgive him and let him out. Meanwhile, the Admiral throws the President in the Brig under suspicion.

Turn 14 - Zarek issues an executive order to break Roslin out of the brig. A water shortage threatens the fleets food reserves. [Crisis: Water Shortage]

Turn 15 - Admiral Helo goes to the research lab in search of technological answers to the fleets problems. The fleet puts the prisoners on a work program so they may earn their freedom [Crisis: Prison Labor]

You Will Go to the Moon!

When I was a wee lad I had this book lying around the house.

You Will Go to the Moon




You WILL go to the Moon. The whole book was about a kid's vacation to a Soviet / US Space Station and to the moon. The book spoke very matter-of-factly about how all of these things most definitely WOULD happen to me. I grew up with this idea in my head that I could visit the Moon just like Disneyland or Europe. I didn't question this notion for a long time. There were old videos of people on the moon already. These were old videos. They MUST be able to send me to the moon now if they were able to send those guys there all those many years ago. It only made sense.

In my reality, the Moon was a place you could visit whenever you wanted to. You can only imagine my disappointment as I slowly figured out that not only couldn't I go to the moon without being a skilled astronaut, but they weren't even doing moon missions anymore. No one could go to the Moon at all!

"What a crock of shit!" I thought to myself, until I read this.

"NASA plans to build outpost on the moon"

It looks like my reality will soon become reality!

All i can think is "It's about friggin time!"

Anamanaguchi releases new album: Dawn Metropolis

http://www.dawnmetropolis.com/

I have been waiting for this one for a long time. Anamanaguchi (8-bit chiptune punk rock band from New York) has just released their newest album "Dawn Metropolis" and it is every bit as bloopy and rock and roll as their first EP, Power Supply. You can listen to the album for free at dawnmetropolis.com

Family Secrets Part 1: Your Parents as Real People.

It is an inevitable fact of life that at some point in your life, you must learn that your parents are just people. Every child starts out with the innate trust of his parents. We couldn't survive if we didn't listen when they told us not to touch the hot stove or run out into the middle of the road, but that trust seems to give way over time as you build up your own experiences. At some point you recognize that your parents are not the eternal font of knowledge and benevolence you once thought they were. You start to judge them by the same standards as you judge other people and they take on a strange double identity. They are your parents, and they are people just like everyone else you know.

I didn't have a sudden realization or revelation that made me look at my parents as regular people. It was a gradual process. It started when I was 10 years old in our living room in the old house my parents bought in Fenton. Mom and Dad gathered my sister and I in the living room to 'talk'. Family meetings weren't something that ever happened in our house, so I immediately knew something was wrong. I remember sitting on the couch next to my Dad while my sister sat in Mom's lap. I sat in silence while my parents explained to us what a divorce was, and how they were planning on getting one. My sister didn't start crying until Mom and Dad explained that they could no longer live together. I kept sitting there in silence, letting my sister ask all the questions.

That was the first of many experiences that made me realize how human my parents really were. While my sister cried and begged them to stay together, I knew they couldn't. I knew that this decision wasn't made lightly, and once it had been made, there would be too much hurt for them to fix it. I was only ten years old, but I had come to terms with their divorce even before they had finished telling me about it.

This was also the first time I saw my parents as real people with their own lives and their own problems, not just as parents. Throughout the separation and the divorce, I got a lot of these little insights. Every time my mom said that my dad was "living in sin" with his new girlfriend, I was able to take it as a jab from a heartbroken woman rather than the gospel truth of my mother. Whenever she came home from work and yelled at us for not doing chores she had never asked us to do, and locked herself in her room for hours, I knew it had very little to do with what me and my sister had done and everything to do with how she felt. All these little glimpses into my parents real lives added up to a realization that my parents were entirely capable of fucking things up. I think it was good for me to realize this at such a young age. When you can look critically at the things your parents do, you are less likely to pick up on some of their bad habits.

When you see your parents as real people, you are faced with a daunting question. Do you like these people? Of coarse you love your parents; they take care of you and love you unconditionally. They are family and you love them in the way only family can love one another, but when you see them as real living breathing people with their own problems, flaws, and quirks you have to look at that new person standing in front of you and ask yourself "Do I like this person?". Would I like them if they weren't my parents? Luckily for me, the answer was yes. My mother has a ruthless sense of humor and a sharp wit that I appreciate. My Dad is the kindest and most giving person I know. They both are very likeable people. I even like my Step Father and Step Mother (although I couldn't always have said that). But what happens when you finally learn who your parents are, and you don't like them at all.

Part 2 is the story of how my Grandmother kept a dark secret from her children all the way to her death bed.

Information Theory and Memory.

You can probably file this one under 'crackpot theories' but lately I've been thinking about ideas, information, and how they spread. I am sure anyone who reads enough Neal Stephenson (link) will probably come to the same conclusions as I have, but writing it all down in an open, public, and embarrassing forum can only help deepen my understanding. Either that or I'll gain enough ridicule to stop thinking about this stuff altogether. Either way I win.

Information theory is a broad and nebulous discipline that straddles math, physics, language, and enough other subjects to be patently interesting to anyone interested in punishing themselves by reading thick books. I have yet to delve much into it beyond skimming the surface but there is one example that I read that sums up a nice little chunk of it. Say you flip a coin one thousand times, and you want to let me know, in order, whether each coin flip was heads or tails. This should be easy enough. You can just call me up on the phone, and read me your list of one thousand results.

Think about how much information that is though. That is 'Heads' or 'Tails' one thousand times. That is 5000 characters worth of information. Heads and Tails each has 5 characters. So lets represent each coin flip with a number; 0 for heads, 1 for tails. Now that is more like it. We've got 1000 coin flips and 1000 'bits' of information.

Now lets pretend your coin has some nasty crap stuck to one side of it, and now your coin almost always lands heads up. In fact, you've done the experiments, and you know that this coin will land tails up only once for every 1000 flips. I call you up and ask for the results of your latest experiment. Well, you could just go right ahead and give me a stream of 1's and 0's just like you were doing when you didn't get some nastiness all over your shiny new coin. I would have all of the information of your coin flip, but since you and I both know that there is only one tails in the whole sequence, wouldn't it be easier to just tell me where it was? You could tell me that the tails showed up in space number 33, and I wouldn't have to listen to you list off your whole big stream of numbers.

What is going on here, is you have used your predetermined knowledge of how your number set will turn out to compress your information. Before, I was listening to you spout off a list of ones and zeros for 15 minutes; now our phone conversation is about 10 seconds. You have gone from giving me 1000 bits of information to giving me the same amount of information, but in only 6 bits (33 in binary is '10 0001', the location of the one). This is the fundamental basic of information theory and the idea behind all kinds of lossless data compression that you use on your computer every day.

We know how to compress data on a computer. This is a technology that has been around for awhile now, and they have applied it to almost anything that can be stored on a computer. The compression is based on the symbols that the computer uses. There are only 2 symbols, used to store the information and the computer is made to recognize and operate on vast amounts of these symbols; but what about other storage medium. What about the human brain?

This is where the crackpot section starts and I start to speculate some stuff. These aren't completely uninformed opinions. There is a cursory understanding of the involved sciences going on, but by no means is it a deep or meaningful understanding. If you find fault with anything, please publically flog me, but understand I am speculating here.

The brain recognizes a whole different set of symbols than a computer. Through evolution, mankind has had their brains hard wired to recognize symbols according to their importance in survival and passing on our genes. We are good at remembering smells, other human faces, unique visual stimuli, subtle nuances in sounds. Our brains are wired up to the five senses, and it seems as if we store this information pretty efficiently. Sure, we are capable of using other symbols such as writing, or pictographs, or even the binary code of computers, but those are symbols that are used to abstract our senses into different symbology. When you read a word, or a series of words, it creates a picture in your mind based on your experiences. You understand the words because you can relate them to unique experiences you have had via your senses.

In the coin example, a large amount of information was stored with a very small amount of information. This was possible because the occurrence of the number 1 was so extremely rare in our set, that we could convey it in a simplified form. The symbols 1 and 0 allowed us to convey the message differently with the same symbols. We used 1 and 0 to represent a larger number rather than just heads or tails. We embedded a different symbol within our limited symbol system.

Is it possible that the brain does, or is capable of doing the same thing? We remember unique sensory experiences very well. Is the rarity of such an occurrence more easily compressed in our memories because of the same principals of information theory?

My memories are mostly of myself, other people, and food. In that order. All of the math, history, science, etc. that I have learned in school pales in comparison to the vast amount of data I have stored in my head about other people and my own sensory experiences. It is harder to remember something that didn't directly happen to you. You have to solidify the concepts out of an abstracted data set (read the words, translate them into ideas). That extra step can be a hindrance to learning because words, letters, and numerals are not the symbols our brains natively use. They use direct sensory experiences. Is it possible that sensory experiences can compress themselves in our brain because that is the symbology our brain uses natively?

(find the link to the guy who can do crazy math in his head). My speculation is that this guy has the ability to encode numbers in his head as a native data type (ie sensory input) in much the same way we would remember someone's face. (find the link to the piano synesthesia girl) I also think that because this girl can encode music in her head as more than one sensory experience it makes learning music exponentially easier for her.

What if we were to take this concept into effect every time we wanted to learn something in order to compress the knowledge into our heads. Next time you are studying for a history test, try eating a new dish you have never had before or listening to a new kind of music you are unfamiliar with that corresponds with the subject matter of the test. If you are studying for a French language exam, try cooking French foods and listening to French composers. Try studying in a new and unfamiliar location. It just may be that the unique experience you give yourself may help you compress all that dry information as a unique and rare experience.

I haven't tested my theory yet, but I'll be sure to give you a full report on how it works when I do.

Introductions are in order...

above: Me in a back room at CBGB's stringing my guitar.


My name is Andrew Lenox. I am a novice programmer, an ex-musician, a long time student, a husband, a fledgling game designer, and a dog person; in no particular order.

I started this blog because:

1. I have a few far flung blogs about more specific subjects, but my interests always seem to stray. I get interested in some other subject and start yet another new blog. This one will be a lot more general.
2. I don't want my Myspace page to be the first thing that comes up on Google when an HR person searches for me.
3. I am a conformist, and therfore, must have a blog just like everyone else.
4. I have offensive, disquieting, uninformed opinions that are sure to entertain those who are smarter than me.
5. I am a conformist and I want the DHS to put me on a watch list just like everyone else.

Things I like:

Linux: I dual installed it about 6 months ago, but just recently made the switch completely

RSS: There isn't a better way to read the internet. Hell, there isn't a better way to compute. I want everything to be fed through my reader.

Pen and Paper Games: RPG's, choose your own adventures, sudoku, board games, etc.

Writing Music: Haven't done a lot of this lately, but in a later post I'll fill you in on all my musical exploits. If you want something now you can search for "Diver" in itunes.

My Wife: She is awesome.

My Dog: Ben Franklin is stench and cuteness

Camping: Going twice this summer will not be enough

This list doesn't end, but has been abridged for this post.