Archive for the 'History' Category

Frederick County “Future Link”, and memories of the past

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

I gave three half-hour hands on presentations at the Frederick County, Maryland Future Link conference for high-school sophomores Thursday. It was pretty fun, and the students (about 25-30 in each group) were great!

Preparing for this, I remembered that back when I was in junior-high and high school, I’d learned a ton about programming by typing in the game programs in SoftSide magazine, a little bit at a time to see what they did and debug them. Later I branched out to writing my own (very simple) games, which I gave away to my friends. One was a snake game, using the IBM PC’s line characters for the snake body. I wrote it as a high-school student in Maryland, then went off to college in Illinois. One day, I came back from classes to find my roommate from Washington state playing it! I don’t know how it made it coast to coast, but I really hoped to be able to give that sense of possibility to the students Thursday.

We used Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio, in part because it’s free and very accessible, in part because it has a rich set of examples, and in part because their new community game distribution system gives a way for individually created games to get out there. Plus, I was able to bring one of our XBox 360s to show what we did running on a game system. We started with the catapult mini-game example. With only half an hour, we could only do relatively simple things, but I wanted to show how easy it is to get started. First I dropped in an image of my head to replace the pumpkin that the catapult normally flings, then we walked through changing the bounce logic to do random bounces instead of the simple predictable bounces it normally does. Some of the students went off in their own directions, creating other simple modifications beyond the ones I’d suggested. Not bad in half an hour!

Posted in CS, Events, Game consols, General, History, xbox | 1 Comment »

From MUDs to Worlds of Warcraft, is it progress?

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

Today’s massively multiplayer games and environments like Worlds of Warcraft and Secod Life have their roots in MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) popular in the 80s and 90s. The Guardian’s games blog has an interview with Richard Bartle, co-creator of the original MUD in 1978 at the University of Essex.

The post’s title is a provocative quote from Bartle, “I’d close World of Warcraft!” MUD creator Richard Bartle on the state of virtual worlds.

Note: You can try out a version on MUD2, Bartle’s successor to the original MUD here.

Posted in History, MMOGs | No Comments »