Student Area

1. The Pointer

 
You are a cursor on a computer screen. The human who normally controls you has left the computer on and you decide to explore a bit while he’s away – to the places that he never lets you click upon.

You will navigate from application to application. The tone of writing will be somewhat humorous. I want to explore what the thoughts and feelings of those unused applications on your desktop would be. You encounter many characters – a homeless Clippy from Microsoft Word who has been kicked out of the lastest update. An abandoned, ‘starving’ Neopet whose owner left them a good five years ago. An old Geocities webpage that is about to be torn down. Etc. You have many choices in terms of how you interact with these  characters – some may join you on your journey if you choose to befriend them.

The game will be more focused on exploration than reaching a certain goal. Eventually the game will ‘end’ (either positively or negatively) when the human comes back to the computer and assumes control of you once again.

Sample:

 

The human has left the computer on once again. The mouse sits helplessly on the desk, unable to move itself without the human’s assistance. You blink sleepily, flickering a bit on the screen. Gently rolling green hills surround you, and their familiar presence is somewhat comforting in the human’s absence. Gazing around the desktop, you wonder if you really do need to depend on the human to move. It would be nice if you could see the other side of those hills.

Well, there’s no harm in trying, right? Flexing all of your pixels, you prepare to…

-Wiggle slightly to the left

-Wiggle slightly to the right

-Wiggle upwards

-Wiggle downwards

-I don’t want to move anywhere. I’m content with sitting here.

(Depending on which way you move, you would have the option to explore different applications. Not moving would end the game.)

 
2. Mannekijn

You are a mannequin at Victoria’s Secret with an independent streak. Fed up of your body being put on display in lingerie for men (and women) to ogle daily, you wander the mall at night looking to trade places with a fellow mannequin. You decide which stores to explore and what to do – will you push fellow mannequins to the ground, brutally shattering them to pieces as you take their place? Convince them to leave their job? (I’ll try to not make this very dialogue-heavy.)

Sample:

It is 11 PM, and the store is being closed up. You angrily glare at the floor manager with your wooden-carved eyes. Today, she decided to put you in a skimpy push up bra and a thong that barely covers anything at all. The other mannequins giggle and grin to each other, cooing over colorful heels and bras and underwear, but not you. Why couldn’t you have been put in a classier place, like J.Crew or Bloomingdale’s? As you look towards the entrance of the store, you realize that the floor manager has left and shut the lights off, but has forgotten to put down the iron gates that prevent anyone from entering and exiting the store at night. This could be your chance!

-Wander over to the entrance of the store
-Sprint out of the store as fast as your wooden legs can take you
-Chat with the other mannequins a bit
-Stay frozen in place. After all, this is what you’ve been trained to do for the rest of your life.

1) On the surface, the game appears to be about taking the role of a sentient test android (A-012) as it is hacked by an external source and forced to escape it’s training facility.  The player would make choices to nullify the hacker’s commands and stay within the safety of the facility.

The core idea is to leave the player questioning the ethics of controlling this android machine which has some sentient thought.  The main tool for doing this is by deceiving the player, by use of 3rd person narration, into believing they are playing as the android, when in fact, they are playing as an engineer employed by the android’s maker to control the android.  A possible expansion of this idea is an initial (disguised) choice that determines if you play as the hacker or the engineer where in both situations, the android attempts to communicate its wish to escape both entities.

A-012 moved sluggishly as it carried the blocks from point A to point B.  This was a routine exercise, done daily for the past six months, and to be honest, it was tedious and boring.  A-012’s expression reflected it’s boredom.  The test was supposed to show that A-012 could learn to associate the colors on the blocks with the circles at point B.  A-012 moved in jerking motions as it picked up the last block.

2) The story of a cell phone’s eventual disuse and replacement told backwards.  Rather than choosing your next action, you choose how you got to your current predicament.  Through the cell-phone’s life, it passes between a couple users with different usage styles.

It’s official, I’m done.  Four days ago he went off and bought another cell phone, one of those fancy new ones with their big screens and fancy features.  I haven’t had a good charge since a week ago and I’m just barely holding on.  I can’t even make phone calls anymore.

Choice: a) Interrupt the game to prompt low battery or b) the game looks like it’ll be done in a minute or two, hold off until then to prompt low battery.

Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths

What stuck out to me about this reading was the juxtaposition of choice and inevitability.  Tsui Pen’s Garden of Forking Paths, describes a labyrinth of infinite choices and the simultaneous outcomes of all of these choices in our lives.  Despite the multitude of choice and the infinite number of outcomes this presents, I found it interesting that this story seems to focus on inevitability over choice.  Yu Tsun seems to consider his impending death as inevitable despite all the choices he makes through the story (such as choosing to go to Ashgrove and choosing to go to Albert.)  When riding the train to Ashgrove, he states that those lacking willpower, “should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past,” which seems to imply that he had given up choice from that point on.  The fact that he saw glimpses of other parallel worlds could also imply that it was inevitable that he would meet Albert Stephen, and that this moment was a moment of convergence with one outcome, that he would kill Albert.

 

Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/ Dream Machines

This piece really puts into perspective how far personal computers have come with a large number of his suggestions already implemented.  (Such as version control and some of the educational applications like the digital dissections.)  His thoughts on user-interface design using fanatics can also be clearly seen in today’s technology.  I especially enjoyed his educational hyper-media format which seems to simulate a one-on-one tutor that can be memorable and personal despite being a computer.  The idea of Stretchtext, a hypertext in which narratives can be told in finer or coarser detail with the turn of knob, is also intriguing and is somewhat similar to what simple Wikipedia is attempting.

CYOA – Christian Swinehart

The author makes a quick comparison between CYOA and dictionaries near the beginning. The difference between the two however, is that in a dictionary you have a specific goal in mind and each step you take directly brings you closer to that goal whereas in CYOA your goal is to generically win and you may or may not take steps that will bring you closer. You have no idea how your actions now will affect you later. I’m curious if it’s possible to make a dictionary style CYOA.
The author also never mentions whether any of the orderings (random, serial, coordinated) have any advantage over the other. Logically it doesn’t seem like one would be better than another but there also has to be a reason why authors choose the pattern they do.

The Garden of Forking Paths

I was surprised that this story didn’t reflect the novel it referred to that is, I was surprised that the outer story about Tsun wasn’t itself a “Garden of Forking Paths.” And where Ts’ui Pen’s novel at least recognizes that bad can happen, in the outer story nothing “bad” really happens. One could argue that the death of Albert and the main character are negative results, but I argue the opposite. With the death of Albert Tsun was able to ease the fear of his commanders off of his race and the secret of the labyrinth no longer stays hidden in Albert’s mansion but will most likely be publicized with a possible publication of Dr. Albert’s restoration of the work.
I’m also curious as to how a book like the Garden of Forking Paths could be written. in order for all outcomes to happen at once, wouldn’t the reader have to be aware of all possibilities at once? but the natural makeup of a book (that is it’s page set up) makes this impossible because any given section of the book would have to pick a single path to follow thus ignoring all other paths .
Laslty, what was the point of mentioning this text at all? It seemed to have little relevance to the story as a whole.

The text seem to structure itself as if we were in the mind of Tsun so some of the action seemed sudden or jumpy. It’s an interesting addition to the story.

1)

Elements:
non human  characters
multiple characters

Title: We Could Make Such Nice Music Together
Characters Descriptions: Spheres that have inner music. Male spheres have one note and female spheres have two associated with it. If the chord that results from the two of them together is beautiful then we’ve found love.

Story Line :  A young man finds love quickly but a tragic accident kills the love of his life. Having grown up believing that there is only 1 true love out there for any given individual – red string of fate idea. Years go by, decades even and he finally meets another girl. There music works but it’s slightly jarring. Both know but neither care to do anything about it having waited so long for this. They settle. The final scene is of them in a coffee shop and their perfect matches are only feet away from them.

2)

Elements:
Non human major character
events in non-linear order
Title: It’s a Dull World
Character Description: Characters are spheres with a single light bulb that represents each character’s self worth.
Story Line:  We visit the main character seeing him from birth to death. At birth he is brilliantly glowing but through years of being pushed and prodded by those most close to him to do better, be better his light slowly begins to dim. Although his light dims with each attack, he doesn’t realize this until he reaches adulthood. One day he looks at himself, recognizes the damage caused and tries to build himself back up but at the end of his life the audience sees that even though his made major headway he was never able to fully get back to where he started.

The Garden of Forking Paths –

My first thought upon finishing this reading was that Dr. Yu Tsun’s method of delivering his message may not have been the most efficient, but it was definitely clever in a morbid way. As Albert spoke to Yu Tsun and described many different universes in which he and Dr. Yu Tsun may never meet at all, or in which he was already dead, he recognized the possibility that Yu Tsun could be formulating a plan to kill him. Albert turned his back to Yu Tsun despite this. My question is, was this intentional? Did he want to impose a choice upon Yu Tsun? Shoot Albert, and one future is created in which Yu Tsun’s message is delivered. Do not shoot, and an entirely different future is created.

I also was interested by the idea that Tsui Pen wrote his novel about multiple universes without ever mentioning the word “time”. He left his many manuscripts as a puzzle for future generations to figure out, while slyly commenting: ”I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths”. He even envisions the future as a multitude of branching paths leading to a number of different futures/universes being created. In some of those futures, people are able to solve his puzzle and grasp the concept of his garden of forking paths; to others, his ideas are lost completely.

 
Computer Lib / Dream Machines –

I appreciated Ted Nelson’s discussion about the existence of a huge gap between computer people and ‘laypeople’, which I think still exists today. This gap is certainly closing as programming spreads into other disciplines, such as computational biology, language technologies, and much more; but, there still seems to be a separation between those who are ‘computer people’and those who are ‘not good with computers’. I completely agree with Nelson in that the basics of computers aren’t too hard to understand – it’s just that more information needsto be made accessible and understandable to those who are interested in learning, free of overcomplicated and unecessary technobabble. Oftentimes introductory programming coursesare intimidating and present the student with a huge amount of new information, especially if you’re not too familiar with computers. I think there needs to be more classes that are in a more apporachable middle ground. These should be presented to children at a younger age, to introduce the basics of computers to kids as they grow up so that computers aren’t quite so intimidating anymore.

As for his ideas on computer-assisted instruction, I love the idea of the branching path lesson structure. This could definitely be beneficial to students with short attention spans who want to jump around to many different topics, but it would also allow students who excel at certain subjects to pursue those subjects further. I also appreciate how much he emphasized design and control schemes. Nelson describes how a team of artists, writers, and designers should create the layout and main structure of the lessons, and it’s up to the programmers to implement it and adjust the software/hardware accordingly. While that’s not always how it works in the real world, I appreciate his inclusion of the design components of software as a vital part of the software development life cycle, for I believe that the importance of good design is often overlooked by programmers.

Ahmaa

An interactive experience which aims to serve as a vessel for the user into his own mind in order to experience it in a different way than usual. I am interested in creating an experience that will give me the illusion of traveling into myself, hopefully I can give any user this experience. The story is not about events occurring so much as it is about describing the sensory characteristics of an imagined environment. My wish is to describe something which is defined loosely enough so that people can fill it with their own constructs but at the same time have a similar sensory experience to that of other users. I am interested in studying how the story affects the emotional state of players. There will be certain ambient conditions and perhaps even a series of steps/ritual before starting to read the story, the purpose of these will be to have the user enter an ideal state of perception and openness to feel the story. I try to avoid talking about things I want people to stop perceiving, like time for example. I also attempt to make the descriptions come alive in such a way that they can be felt by people. The choice of words I use needs to be particularly careful so that they can generate the right feelings in the users. Progressively, the story moves from more concrete to more abstract.

The vast dark ocean blue under the black sky, you can feel the dark blue as it embodies your being… The cool temperature inside the cave where light has never been. You cannot see well, it is too dark to know. The cool underwater which allows you to feel its internal currents as they go through your physical body. You allow yourself to leave it, to immerse yourself in the alternative, the one where it is dark and blue and your heart is cool and your spirit is free. Where the sounds are of life, pure and absolute.

 

Choice:
– Experience what awaits further. I have opened my heart to live fully.
– Internal forces have not aligned for me to be able to feel as I need to yet.

Kuku

A little orange fluffy ball of emotion named Kuku falls next to you. It makes some squeaky sounds and it rolls a little on it self while it appears it attempts to get itself into a consistent shape. It reacts to the user but it has no face to show emotion. The story revolves around you having to decide what to do with this ball. It doesn’t look at you or react in any other way but sound. The idea of the game is not so much to give the user choice, but rather to make the user feel in certain ways when he makes a choice. If he treats the ball well, he will receive love and will hopefully feel good about himself in the real world. If he doesn’t care for the fluffy ball, he will receive sad feelings which are contagious. The more involved he gets with Kuku, the more it will be able to influence his emotions.

What is this? It is right next to you. A little orange fluffy ball. It has a name tag, it says Kuku. It seems it needs to roll around for some reason, it looks like it is trying to get into a comfortable shape. Maybe you can help it by picking it up and trying to help it fit into its natural shape?

Choice:
– My joy is profound when I see this creature, I will love it.
– I am too busy to help a living creature that needs my help.

Hi everyone,

My name is Will.  I am a senior Self-Defined major in Digital Production.  My major covers many areas from film, graphic design, photography, industrial design with digital fabrication methods, 3D modeling, animation, rendering, programming, and architectural works.  My original major was Architecture.  My job at the moment is working as a monitor in the Architectural Digital Fabrication Lab.

Some Skills

• Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier Pro, After Effects
• Processing Code
• 3D modeling, Rhino 4.0, learning Maya
• Vray Rendering, learning Mental Ray
• dFab Equipment, Laser Cutter, CNC Mill, Vaccuform, 7-Axis Robot

Yeah, and I love to learn new skills.  So if you can teach, I can listen!

Hi!
I’m Katie Nestor, a senior CS major/art minor. Looking to head into the games industry after CMU.

Animation skills: Blender, Maya, little bit of Sketchup

Game engine skills: Unity, various tile editors

Programming skills: Java, C, C++, C# (soon), ActionScript with the Flixel game programming library