Experts to college librarians: play more video games

An article in Inside Higher Ed, When ‘Digital Natives’ Go to the Library, reports on advice some have to help students connect with libraries.

“College and university librarians got some unconventional advice Saturday: Play more video games. At a packed session for academic librarians attending the annual meeting of the American Library Association, in Washington, the topic was how to help students who have learned many of their information gathering and analysis skills from video games apply that knowledge in the library. Speakers said that gaming skills are in many ways representative of a broader cultural divide between today’s college students and the librarians who hope to teach them.”

Via Slashdot.

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Emergent releases new Gamebryo game development engine

Emergent Game Technologies has released the new version of their Gamebryo game development engine that includes support for multi-core processors. Gamebryo can produce games that run on a PC, Xbox 360, or Sony PS3. See the Emergent press release for more information. UMBC has a license for Gamebryo for use in courses and student projects.

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GAIM to get 20 Xbox 360s

The UMBC GAIM programs won an award from Microsoft to get 20 Xbox 360s and 20 XNA Creators Club licenses. These will form the foundation of a new GAIM lab in the Engineering building. We have plans to use these new systems in several upcoming classes in both Visual Arts and Computer Science.

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Physician, heal thyself of Acute Wiiitis

The current issue of the distinguished New England Journal of Medicine has a letter describing a new malady, Acute Wiiitis (Volume 356:2431-2432, 7 June 2007, Number 23). The author, Dr. Julio Bonis of Barcelona, diagnosed himself with Wiiitis, which was brought about by Wii Sports.

“The treatment consisted of ibuprofen for one week, as well as complete abstinence from playing Wii video games. The patient recovered fully.”

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Will Wright on Spore

The New Yorker has a very interesting 26 minute video interview with game designer Will Wright in which he demonstrates parts of his long anticipated game Spore. Wright also discusses the art and philosophy of game design with moderator John Seabrook. The event was part of the New Yorker sponsored 2012: Stories From the Near Future conference which took place in May 2007.

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Game designers test the limits of AI

An article by Scott Kirsner in the Boston Globe, Game designers test the limits of artificial intelligence, talks about research aimed at improving massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).

“A lot of the most interesting work in artificial intelligence is being done by game developers,” says Bruce Blumberg, senior scientist at Blue Fang Games in Waltham, and formerly a professor at MIT’s Media Lab. “You have really bright kids who are dealing with problems they don’t realize are insoluble. They’re very motivated.”

In MMOGs, most of the characters are intelligent because that are controlled by people, so the behavior of computer controlled characters compare badly. Another challenge of MMOGs is that the human-controlled characters interact largely through conversations in natural language.

“You can’t talk to characters and expect a response that feels real,” Davis says. “So there are no games that are like detective stories, or romances, which are popular genres in the movies, because you can’t interview suspects or talk to other people.” … One way to get there is by having humans “train” the AI software. That’s the approach that game designer Jeff Orkin, now a grad student at the Media Lab, is taking. With a project called The Restaurant Game, Orkin invites players to assume the role of a restaurant’s wait staff. His plan is to capture their behavior and dialogue, and use it to build more realistic software-driven characters, in the same way that designers sometimes use motion capture cameras to record and replicate human movement.

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Understanding Nintendo’s success with the Wii

Nintendo has had a big hit with the Wii, which has been outselling PS3 and Xbox combined this Spring. An article in the New York Times, Putting the We Back in Wii, attributes this, in part, to a new willingness on Nintendo’s part to collaborate with other makers of game software.

“Nintendo is known for turning out hits with memorable characters like Donkey Kong and the Super Mario Bros., but it has had a reputation for cold-shouldering game software developers because it preferred to make both its hardware and software internally. …
     The secretive company is coming out of its shell. It has made a concerted effort to woo other makers of game software as part of a broader change in strategy to dominate the newest generation of video game consoles.
     The new Nintendo surprised employees at the software maker Namco Bandai Games when during a routine meeting at Namco Bandai’s Tokyo headquarters a year and a half ago, Nintendo’s usually aloof executives made a sudden appeal for their support. The Nintendo group had come to demonstrate a prototype of the Wii, which had not then been released. They handed Namco Bandai employees the unique wand-like controllers and as the developers tested a fly fishing game, the Nintendo team urged them to build game software for the console, listing arguments about why Wii would be a chance for both companies to make money.”

Another reason is that developing games for the multi-core parallel processors at the heart of the PS3 and Xbox is more difficult, so new titles have been slower to come to market.

“The Wii’s simplicity is also the selling point for software makers. Mr. Wada said developers had been slower to write games for PlayStation 3 because of the greater complexity of the console’s main processor, the high-speed multi-core Cell Chip. He said PlayStation 3’s production delays had also made Sony slow to provide developers with the basic codes and software needed to write games for the new console.
    At Namco Bandai, Mr. Unozawa said PlayStation 3 was so complex, with its faster speeds and more advanced graphics, that it might take 100 programmers a year to create a single game, at a cost of about $10 million. Creating a game for Wii costs only a third as much and requires only a third as many writers, he said.

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June meeting of the DC IGDA

The June meeting of the IGDA DC chapter will feature a talk by Paul Barnett, the online design manager for Warhammer. The meeting will take place on Thursday June 28th at EA/Mythic, 4035 Ridge Top Road, Fairfax, VA 22030. IGDA DC chapter meetings are open to IGDA non-members with an interest in game development. See the IGDA forum posting for more information.

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A coming World Wide Web of 3D virtual worlds

The Economist’s current quarterly technology report has an interesting article discussing the evolution of MMOGs and virtual worlds.

Online gaming’s Netscape moment?

Video games: Existing virtual worlds are built on closed, proprietary platforms, like early online services. Might they now open up, like the web?

The premise of the article is that virtual world game engines like Multiverse are not only making it easier to create new worlds but will also allow characters and game entities to move from world to world. They liken his to the change that happened as the Internet moved from being a series of “walled gardens” based on proprietary online services like the well, AOL and Prodigy to the Web and its standard languages, protocols and middleware.

“As with the web, the hope is that the emergence of a single, open platform will encourage wider adoption and new uses of the technology. Before the web, companies that wished to establish an online presence had to do so on proprietary platforms. The same is true today. Lots of companies are setting up shop in Second Life, but some might prefer to have their own worlds, not just islands in someone else’s world, just as they have their own websites. Multiverse says that companies are starting to create worlds for training simulations, business collaboration, and modelling disasters.”

(more…)

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Sun’s Project Wonderland is an open-source virtual world manager

Sun’s James Gosling demonstrated their open-sourced Project Wonderland at JavaOne this year.

Project Wonderland is a 3D scene manager for creating collaborative virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio and can share live applications such as web browsers, OpenOffice documents, and games.

Sun’s goal is to create a multi-user virtual environment that has robust security, scalability, reliability, and functionality, enabling organizations to use it as a place to conduct real business.

“Organizations should be able to use Wonderland to create a virtual presence to better communicate with customers, partners, and employees. Individuals should be able to do their real work within a virtual world, eliminating the need for a separate collaboration tool when they wish to work together with others. Individuals should also be able to tailor portions of the world to adapt to their work needs and to express their personal style. … One important goal of the project is for the environment to be completely extensible. Developers and graphic artists can extend the functionality to create entire new worlds, new features in existing worlds, or new behaviors for objects and avatars.

If you are handy with Java, it might be fun to experiment with this, maybe by prototyping a usecase for a University community.

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