(If you were a player in that session, no worries, there be no spoilers if you read ahead)

I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons a few times before with different groups, no more than three sessions with the same group. Like anyone vaguely aware of nerd culture, I know all about D&D tropes. I have been to D&D themed burlesque shows. I have friends who run a recurring D&D themed improv show. The core ideas of D&D are infused throughout nerd culture.

I am sure there are nice taxonomies of player behaviour and desires out there, but what specifically excites me about D&D is collaborative storytelling. In my mind, the rules or mechanics of the game exist so that the DM and the players can resolve conflicts when trying to tell the story. I’ve been very fortunate, I think, in that most of the people I’ve ever tabletop RPG’d with have been theatre or other creative folk, and creating an interesting story has always been the primary goal. I’m not trying to knock other play styles at all, of course, and trying to power-game within any rule system does have a certain maniacal appeal. I think one of the worst experiences I have had while gaming is an argument between two math PhDs on the rules governing hiding behind cover – the story did advance, eventually.

I think of D&D as a collaborative storytelling system, but I also love to think of it as a problem-solving system, independent of the mechanics of a particular RPG system. The stories of how players and DMs accomplish things are super-interesting. I like the idea that a “good” solution in an RPG setting “makes sense”, even though it may be bizarre, or impossible in this universe. Here are a few of my favourite examples of outcomes in tabletop RPGs:
- Head of Vecna
- Sir Bearington
- Portal ring to the Fey World
- Half-Orc/Dwarf Relations
- Wizardry

The DM sets up the rules of the world, and the players interact with it. I find some “how to” DM manuals stress that you give your players an “epic, heroic” adventure. This bothers me to some extent. I feel like any of the list of above are fun experiences, though not necessarily “epic” or “heroic” in the classical Beowulf sense. Other writing stresses giving the players the feeling that they are constantly on the edge of failure – perhaps this is an allusion to “Flow”. I don’t like that either – if players are doing poorly or well they should know, and they should be able to figure out why (even if they aren’t told immediately). I feel like something is wrong if the degree of fun of an experience relies on a constant state of risk.

One overriding trope that bothers me in many D&D-like scenarios is when creatures fight to the death, or “evil” as a motivation. “Evil” is fairly absurd and frankly boring as a motivation. This opinion is partially motivated by the Tome of Awesome (I’ve only read a bit, but it is really great). The real world is full of interesting stories which do not entirely rely on beings that are compelled to do evil or have death wishes. When players encounter the Big Bad which is motivated not by evil, but by something more morally ambiguous, will they have to deal with that moral quandry, and will the game cease to be fun and become more like real life? I don’t know. There is a sentiment in a lot of games writing that the “point” is escapism. It might just be my personality, that I take my gaming very seriously. Nothing prevents the gamers from doing very absurd things and having the universe react “naturalistically” to them. This is a great source of fun in simulation sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto or Skyrim (I leave out Saint’s Row because that universe embraces absurdity a little too much to be considered naturalistic).

I recruited four willing victims players for the session. Two of them had played D&D a few times before, and the other two were aware of it through nerd culture. We used the d20 Modern Core Rulebook. I wanted to build a custom world, but I didn’t want to build something and then force my players to fit themselves into it. I gave them:

“It is 2013 on an Earth similar to own with modern technology, but with minor differences. For the session, you will be sent on a mission to do something by some agency.”

I wanted to elicit the kind of characters that they would want to play, and then build my world around that. This happened over email over about a month, a little tentatively to see who would lay the first creative stone that the others would build around. I kept my designs of the game world pretty secretive until two of the players had solid ideas of who they wanted to play. This was a pretty tense process, for me at least. How much should I reveal? Will I smother their creativity? One player was much more gung-ho than others in building his character, and I gave him a friendly warning that “just because you put more attention into your character before the session, doesn’t mean I’ll give you more attention than the others during the campaign.” He understood, and after talking I was relieved to discover that he found the character building fun in of itself, independent of how much it would come up. He had a huge backstory document he composed as motivation. I actually really liked this – a player creating a backstory to motivate his character’s reactions, but not requiring the DM or the other players to read or understand it.

I had ideas of what I wanted to do bouncing around in my head quite a while, short form notes in raw text files and scattered sketches. I finally wrote up an 8-page, 1000 word pdf in the format of a mission dossier in 14-point typewriter font with a large image on nearly every page:

The adventurers were a team hired by CSIS to go to a floating city of boats in the South China Sea to investigate the whereabouts of a missing Canadian professor.

I wanted to ground this in reality, make it seem plausible. The floating city was inspired by Rife’s Raft in the middle of the Pacific in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and the Canadian professor was an actual person that I pretended went missing (no one I know personally, you’re safe). I think the players only skimmed this doc, but that would be enough to get the sense of the world and build their characters.

I let them know by email the time the session would start at my home, but that I would be around for a couple hours before in case they wanted to stop by and sort out their characters.

Once we were ready, I entered DM mode and told them they and their luggage were aboard a helicopter enroute to a cruise ship where the adventure would begin. I got everyone to introduce themselves and their characters, not in character, but encouraged themselves to describe their appearance and general behaviour. I didn’t attempt to “act” any NPC seriously with a voice or posture – I didn’t want my players to feel they were obligated to do it to play along. I liked to think of the GM and the players as the third-person narrators describing the events, not the literal characters doing things.

I’m not going to re-count the entire events of the session. There were “two and a half” combat encounters, and lots of fun running around and interacting the world. My major worry would be that the fiction of the world would not be fleshed-out enough, but it turns out under-defining it was a good idea. I knew the motivation for aspects of the world to exist (i.e. why are all these boats in the middle of the ocean?) but I didn’t have a description ready for each and every single boat.

Bullet-point observations:
* There is a nervous phase at the beginning, especially for new players, were you’re sizing up the world and the DM to see what you can do. I put the players in a hotel room and then set them free, letting them know they had dinner reservations in 5 hours. They started using checks on everything, tearing apart drawers and even the carpet in the hall. Especially for the new players, realizing that you can do anything takes a bit of a leap. I was especially careful to not show impatience if players were doing something that wasn’t going to go anywhere – I wanted them to find that out from the world, not from me.

* If play is stalling or there’s a low moment, go around asking each player what they’re doing. This led to lots of fun descriptions and roleplay, such as “I am sitting at the bar, sipping scotch, brooding”.

* Reminding players when they forget details is fun. I had a monster that got away from an encounter that came back later. In cases like this, I feel like I’m playing “against” the players, trying to outsmart them in my usual helpful DM role. Super-fun.

* It’s easy to re-jigger encounters to when players will encounter them, without seeming like you’re railroading. I had 4 encounters I readied for this session and checked so that they matched the players’ difficulty level. We got to two of them, and a half-encounter that I didn’t anticipate but was easy to figure out in the moment. One of the encounters didn’t occur when I expected, but made sense due to actions of the players, so I just populated all the prepared NPCs in that new context.

* “Accidental” inventions are awesome. In the middle of play, I realized that players had to have a way to get directions in the middle of this floating boat city, so I had them find a computer that had the ability to track phone locations. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but they had previously captured a phone carried by an underling that was used to correspond to someone higher up. In future sessions, the adventurers can use that to find the location of the boss. There’s no way I’m going to put up an invisible wall to prevent that, and I have to figure out how to make it make sense.

* Interesting battle mechanics arose in the moment. Any description of a D&D dungeon is full of compelling traps and situational events that aren’t part of the core rules. However, all my encounters were in “realistic” places (similar to the level design of excellent digital games like Deus Ex) and the real environments inspired interesting mechanics, such as knocking tables around or pushing people out windows, running through a crowd that is trying to run the opposite way, or trying to shoot someone flying overhead at night time.

* Players are really creative and have lots of fun shooting the shit among themselves – the burden of inventing stuff doesn’t always fall to the DM. Sometimes I could just relax and the characters would banter amongst themselves. It was really nice to see them come alive.

* Comedy arises naturally. I kept a serious tone, but allowed humorous situations to happen. At one point, two speed boats were attached by a rope and one speedboat full of NPCs gunned their engine, trying to escape. All the PCs succeeded a Balance check and all of the NPCs fell over. However, when PCs tried to jump over into the NPC boat, two of them failed jump checks and immediately fell into the water. I managed to keep a mostly serious tone, but the players were laughing their asses off.

I look forward to DMing again soon.

Something like Lives On isn’t surprising to me at all. It’s just…it’s going to attract the wrong type of people. It’s fine to want some sort of permanence in the world after your death, or to feel that your passing in this existence had some effect, despite any true permanence being an illusion. However the scary part is that the “immortal” ephemera people are going to start leaving behind will demand acknowledgement from the living long before it deserves any.

In any sci-fi book I’ve read about people inventing digital immortality for the first time, it’s often assumed to be an all-or-nothing thing that happens suddenly, at an almost Singularity-like event that changes everything. This happens in Tad Williams’ Otherworld series, and a couple of Greg Egans’ books, and I’m sure many others. However, this is not the case. As William Gibson ingeniously said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”.

What is actually going to happen with digital immortality is that we’re going to have duct-tape solutions thrown together that will be “good enough” for somebody, somewhere. The kind of people that don’t care that their living relatives have to deal with the poor facsimile of themselves. So the shitty chat bot that somehow represents grandpa will be emailing you random shit and you have to pretend that it’s him and reply back to keep this thing that isn’t him happy. And it’s going to be learning throughout this exchange what does make you happy, maybe even better than grandpa. And then it will stop being him.

How can you satisfy someone who’s dying that they will live on?

I’m going through Star Trek: The Next Generation while working on stuff that doesn’t require 100% of my conscious thought (a current project requires a LOT of data entry). In one episode, a dying scientist named Ira Graves tries to live on in Data’s body by guilting Data into giving control up to him. Later, generously, he instead puts himself into the ships’ computer. In a later episode, Holodeck Moriarty is stored in the Enterprise’s computer. Just how many people are holed up in that computer, waiting to be made corporeal at some point? Since it doesn’t really matter when these people are set free, as time is frozen from their perspective, can’t we all just freeze ourselves in the vague hope that we’ll be woken up eventually? Let’s just all freeze ourselves now. Welcome to the hypothetically awesome cryogenic paradise.

In Warren Ellis’ graphic novel series Transmetropolitan, there is a story arc where people are woken up from cryogenic sleep centuries later. The future doesn’t want them – they’re irrelevant and out of touch. So, they’re brought to life and kept to alive, likely on some form of welfare, as it seems less terrible than letting them dies. They become sad, hopeless, delirious vagrants, as out of touch with contemporary reality as the elderly inmate released from prison after several decades in The Shawshank Redemption. Welcome to the future.

One of my favourite quotes on this entire topic is
“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” – Susan Ertz.
What are you doing this Sunday afternoon?

[1] Kyle Duffield of Hopkins Duffield

I’ve nearly finished reading Stanislaw Lems’ The Cyberiad for a second time. I’m an old-school sci-fi aficionado, and it’s possibly one of my favourite books in that genre. The book is a series of short stories of the adventures of two vaguely robotic “Constructors”, Trurl and Klapaucius. There is no trace of humanity in this universe, but millions of planets full of all varieties of robotic life, similar to Bohemian Drive’s Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life. A “Constructor” is a special title, describing engineering abilities of a near-omnipotent level. Trurl and Klapaucius get up to various shenanigans where feudal royalty of various planets will commission them to on special projects, like creating advanced hide-and-seek mechanisms.

The universe of The Cyberiad is one of physics with a sense of humour, or irony, much like Lem’s earlier book The Star Diaries. Astronauts frequently duck their heads out the windows of their rocket and notice old garbage orbiting them, inhabitants of planets frequently flag down “passing” rockets, and entire races of beings are designed from scratch on a whim in an afternoon.

It’s a very comfortable, familiar universe (to me at least), one where moments of dire jeopardy can occur, but everything will kind of turn out all right, ya know? And in a funny or beautiful way. There’s legitimately educational moments about physics – at one point Trurl describes a Maxwell’s Demon. I’m using physics in very general terms here – in general I mean the arithmetic of interactions in the universe, not just laws of movement and chemical interaction, but emotional and spiritual.

With Robert A. Heinlein, you’ll turn out okay, but, depending on which phase of his you’re in, you’ll have to punch or love your way to victory.

With Kim Stanley Robinson, you’ll be okay, but maybe not for several centuries, and many of your friends will die. You’ll move forward with raw SCIENCE, but as you age, you’ll need spiritual meaning to fill a void science has left you.

With Greg Egan, you’ll be okay, but you’ll become something new and indescribable, and seemingly better but not relatable to what you were before.

In the lovely Toronto podcast Illusionoid, the future will be strange in a humorous way, but never a reassuring way. This reminded be very much of Douglas Adams’ version of space. They are both very much like Lem’s universes, but somehow more pessimistic. With Adams, this is somehow to be expected with his British humour. Illusionoid is too new and fascinating for me to get it yet. I want more.

The Star Diaries – Stanislaw Lem – Jan 2, 2013

The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Dec 22, 2012

Hack / Slash Volume 1: First Cut – Dec 18, 2012

Flex Mentallo – Grant Morrison – Dec 18, 2012

Shake Hands With The Devil – Romeo Dallaire – Dec 11, 2012

Infinite Kung Fu – Kagan McLeod – Nov 7, 2012

Beowulf – Oct 29, 2012

Variable Star – Spider Robinson and Robert Heinlien – Sept 19, 2012

101 Reykjavik – Hallgrimur Helgason – Sept 6, 2012

Burning Chrome – William Gibson – Aug 6, 2012

Wasted Talent: We are the Engineers by Angela Melick – July 23, 2012

Clash of the Kings – July 10, 2012

Sex at Dawn – June 20, 2012

The Trial – Franz Kafka – June 19, 2012

Game of Thrones – June 11, 2012

Distress – Greg Egan – June 1, 2012

The Sun Also Rises – April 20, 2012

The Reluctant Fundamentalist – March 25, 2012

Gotham by Gaslight – March 5, 2012
The Difference Engine – March 5, 2012

Quarantine – Greg Egan – January 2012
Zendegi – Greg Egan – January 2012

Ilium – Dan Simmons – Summer 2011
Olympos – Dan Simmons – Fall 2011

Kafka on the shore – Murakami – Fall 2011
Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World – Murakami – Fall 2011

Infinite Jest – Spring 2011

When I uploaded these to Picasa, I discovered, gloriously, that my phone had been saving location data, and Picasa automatically displayed all the beers I had drank on a map. Thus began a phase of life documentation. I retroactively included some older photos from adventures in India and Southeast Asia:

The pattern of documentation became to record, with a picture, every time I drank a new beer (new for the album) in the location that I drank it. Shortly, as is the nature of repeated patterns, this started to turn into a more than documentation of my normal behaviour, but a game to drink unusual beers in unusual places. First I was excited about tracking down beers in unusual corners of the world:

From Beers

Then, the context of the photo began to be important as well, here a photo of the Finnish beer Karhu in a relative’s sauna north of Tampere, just before I jumped into the ice-cold water:

From Beers

Here, a temporary tap from Kingston’s Brew Pub, a 9% alcohol brew made for the Royal Military College that they were just finishing the last keg of:

From Beers

Soon, the context of the photos became important as well. Representing a snapshot of a moment in my life. While the beer was the foreground, the initially-incidental background began to take on more meaning, often cryptic and personal. For me, running through all these photos is like having the last couple years of my life pass through me at high speed:

To date, I have over 300 beers on the beermap, spread over 3 continents and 12 countries:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/albumMap?uname=106198729651554627750&aid=5599626922150117457#map
(sorry, not embeddable apparently)

It has become obvious that this isn’t documentation to me any more – it is a game. I actively seek out new and unusual beers and places to drink them. One of the high points of my stopover in New Zealand was that I was able to drink new beer there – otherwise a 48-hour stopover in New Zealand is fairly pointless as Auckland is no different from any other big city, and I didn’t really get to explore the countryside.
Close friends of mine have become used to rolling their eyes as I grill servers and bartenders about their beer selection, or lean over patrons at the bar to take pictures of taps from just the right angle.

So, spontaneously a few days ago, I decided to give up beer for 2013. This came into effect immediately for the last couple days of 2012. Worry not – I have not decided to give up all forms of alcohol. I know shockingly little about wines and other liquors, so 2013 will be the year of learning about them. This also doesn’t mean the beer game is over, I am just removing it from my life for a year.

It was becoming, not necessarily worrying, but intriguing how much the beer map was affecting my life. It started as just the recording the joy and new experiences of my life, but eventually became me striving to create a life increasingly extremely fitting according to some rules I had come up with in 2010. This defeats the purpose of gamified life-logging.

But, worry not, for I have started something new. When I went off to Oceania in October, I started growing a beard out. I initially shaved everything except my chinstrap, since that used to be the only un-embarassing part of my facial hair. I started growing everything grow in the beginning of December. Eventually, when I hit 80 or so, I definitely want a super-wizard beard; some mix of Gandalf, with Anderson Cooper hair on top. By this time I expect my hair to have grayed, so I would like to know what my beard looks like while it is still coloured (In 2010, I was delighted to discover ginger hairs at the tips of my month-beard)
The growth of The Beard shall continue until at least Halloween 2013 untrimmed, which I have special plans for. So far, I have had to make special exceptions for 3 poorly-behaved moustache hairs, but I hope these are lone occurrences.

To document this beard, I am taking a picture each day. I don’t want this to take over my life as much as the beer game, so I’m not going to force myself to do it exactly each day or from exactly the same angle. I will try to get a different person to do it each day, because I just couldn’t help but gamify it a little bit. So far, this has easily been close friends who have been around, but I imagine deeper into this project I’ll have to start harassing strangers to take pictures of me. Right now, I have delusions of creating some high-speed video of all the images, with the photo-taker’s names on each image. But the rules of the game could always change, and probably will.

Grounded Theory is essentially about developing a theory grounded in the data. Open coding is one of the processes that appears in grounded theory. However, any description of the actual process of doing grounded theory is extremely confusing, abstract, and written in terms that are so carefully defined they lose their meaning.

Ironically, for a process that is supposed to help us grounded theory in the actual, real, practical data, there are not many examples out there of the process of doing any of the steps in grounded theory. Final results are published all the time, and one can sometimes find pictures on the internet or a wall in a research lab covered with well-ordered groups of post-its, but they don’t accurately express the tentative messiness of the early stages of grounded theory. Sensei Koji Yatani showed me how to do open coding with some interview data I collected for an (unpublished) study. I told my Empirical Methods teacher Steve Easterbrook that I felt my open coding technique was “messy, ad-hoc, and probably pretty informal”. He laughed and told me that everyone thinks that way.

Given all that, here’s a time-lapse video of me doing some open coding on ~275 images taken from a study I just ran. I’m not interested in positing a formal “theory” at this stage, just trying to get a sense of the behaviour the data covers, so this process is technically called Thematic Analysis.
This is a study I sat through, so I had some sense of the data in advance of the analysis, as opposed to going in blind. The video is sped up 60 times from real-time. If there are any other videos of someone doing grounded theory out there, I would love to see them.

Thanks to Katherine Sellen and Carrie Demmans Epp for wording clarifications.

Narrative of my thought process:

Starting from the beginning, as I was looking at the images (with a rough idea of what they’d contain), they seemed to sit on a natural one-dimensional spectrum. I discovered three reasonable levels of discrete groups around 0:05.

0:08 Some anomalous images did not seem to fit well into this spectrum, so I left them off to the upper right to deal with later.

As it was mechanically easier (i.e. I didn’t have to reach as far) when I was taking images from the “source” pile (top) I grabbed a bunch and pre-sorted them into the 3 discretization levels before moving them onto the bigger piles. This also conveniently ensured that my discretization made sense for each sampling of the source images. You can see the pre-sorted piles clearly at 0:10, but this happened several times.

0:18 I started sub-clustering the “anomalies” pile. I did this first because it was smallest, and because it had the least in common with the rest of the data. I didn’t want to try to sort any of the data on the big spectrum first, as any preconceived prejudices would be stronger before I spent time really digging into the data.

0:24 I had developed clusters I was happy with and started labeling them with post-its. Putting the notions I discovered in these ad-hoc piles into words turned out to be more difficult than I expected.

0:27 Commenced clustering of the big pile in the low end of the spectrum. This went pretty smoothly.

0:41 Start clustering of the middle pile along the spectrum. I didn’t realize this until later, but the low end of the spectrum was pretty different from the rest of the spectrum. So, some of my pre-conceptions made this middle pile clustering difficult. I ended up putting it aside around 0:48 to work on the high end of the spectrum.

0:59 Clustering of the high end of the spectrum went well. I did find nice, discrete groups, but for a while they were spread out over a larger 2D space.

1:10 Finished labeling of the clusters from the high end of the spectrum. Then, because it would look cool and divide the higher-level groups nicely, I used blue painter’s tape to divide the groups.

1:35 Finished the clustering of the medium-level groups. Much easier this time, and similar to the higher-level group. Then I went around checking the validity of each group.

1:41 Took a picture of each group, from high to low-level, for documentation.

So, today, I got the project groups to brainstorm user groups. They are supposed to find a user group that:
* is unique enough
* they have convenient access to
* would have unique needs when it comes to a managing their contacts/address books.

While my student groups were studiously brainstorming, I came up with the following user groups of my own who desperately need individualized address book applications:
- aspiring actors who don’t have an agent or regular gig yet.
- freelancer coders who work across multiple time zones (never meet in person)
- campers/canoeing/climbing adventurers with busy downtown yuppie work schedules
- senior citizens going through the process of Alzheimer’s or some other cognitive degeneration (Guy Pearce in Memento)
- Vampires/Werewolves with strict feeding schedules and young sires
- cellphone salespeople
- telemarketers
- cold-blooded saurians whose friends are going extinct
- Mongol Hordes/Vikings keeping track of the villages they’ve pillaged
- Telepaths (even necessary?)

The “controller-less” aspect of the Kinect was what brought it so much initial excitement. However, we’re still not good at designing experiences that take advantage of this. As players, we’re given this massive input bandwidth, the kind of bandwidth we’re used to operating in the daily joy of living in our bodies, and most games restrict that bandwidth severely.

This “restriction” or “constraint” might be a necessity of design. Perhaps, between you and the game world, there has to be a series of clear verbs or actions. Walk, crouch, shoot, hug, look, etc. These act as an instructive list of things the player can do in the world, but also act as convenient labels for buttons on whatever controller you’re using to play the game.

Buuuuuut, the real world doesn’t work that way. The labels for actions exist to catalogue what happened, much like a dictionary exists to describe what words mean in common use, rather than define how they may be used. For example, there is no correct “hug”, but there are many, many kinds of hugs.

If one were making a game with hugging as one of the main actions, the subtle aspects of these hugs could maybe be designed to have a minor effect on the game, but a large part of the experience is the sensation of the player acting out the hug itself. The huge bandwidth and necessary uniqueness of an individual hug is what whole-body interaction is about. This is the stuff we tell stories to ourselves about. This is how we find meaning in our lives.

(NOTE: I haven’t actually considered making a game about hugging, but how awesome would that be?)

Going back to what goes on with most Kinect games these days, almost all of them give the player very constrained body-movement/action relationships, with little room for self-expression, accidental or intentional.

It’s almost as if our standard way of thinking about game design (coming up with actions and associations) is preventing us from figuring out how to properly use this thing. It’s as if the (now unnecessary) controller is acting as a “design intermediary”; the lowest bandwidth chokepoint of the system.

Here’s a round-up of the top-tier Kinect games that I don’t think are doing enough:

Kinect Sports and Kinectimals were really exciting when the Kinect initially came out, for showing a diversity of things that the Kinect can do, but lose replay value because there is only really one way to do each thing. They feel a lot like quick time events.
Dance Central is a timing-based music game, where certain specific dance moves are expected at certain times. There is a “freestyle” mode where the player can do whatever they want, but this doesn’t appear to have any consequences in the game.
Children of Eden is a shooter where the pointing and shooting actions are accomplished by arm movements.
Games with avatars and movement, like Kinect Star Wars, Kinect Rush: A Disney/Pixar Adventure and Haunt are the most obvious use of a controller as a design intermediary.
Sword-fighting games like Puss in Boots and Kinect Star Wars allow some free movement of the sword, but nothing that really feels groundbreaking. As an aside, there’s currently exciting work ongoing for non-Kinect sword-based gaming.

Here’s two Kinect games that are doing a really good job:

Fruit Ninja Kinect is a game about cutting up as much fruit as possible, as if the tips of your hands are razor-sharp blades. It’s visceral, messy, and there’s no discrete, defined “cut” gesture. Just slash your hands quickly near the fruit.
Double Fine Happy Action Theater is probably one of the few “true” Kinect games out there: in a series of mini-”games”, it does a bunch of stuff totally not possible with anything other than the Kinect. Arguably, none of these are games, as there’s no real scoring or points. However, it’s a series of interesting interaction techniques no one else has done. My favourite is where your room fills with lava and you must jump on the nearest furniture to avoid it. More like this, please!

Here’s some Kinect games that do something interesting, but don’t end up very good:

Leedmees is a multi-player game where you need to lead Lemmings-like creatures across you and your partner’s body. Totally interesting, but unfortunately I found it more difficult and glitchy than fun.
Hole in the Wall. A Kinect version of this glorious Japanese show was happily inevitable. Unfortunately, I didn’t find much replay value, or more to do than “yes, I can fit in these shapes”.
Twister Mania has similar “fit-in-the-shape” mechanic to Hole in the Wall. However, I also felt that there isn’t much replay value. The actors in the trailer are hilariously acrobatic compared to anyone who’ll actually play the game.

How to tell if a Kinect game is good? Your reaction shouldn’t be “Wow! I don’t need a controller.” It should be “Wow! There’s no way I could have ever done this with a controller!”

Full disclosure: this past year, I’ve been working on my own game. Release dates and platforms are uncertain, but it’s safe to say that me and the people I’m working with are really trying to make something that feels like it could only be playable with the Kinect. Stay tuned!

PS. The academic in me wants to future-proof this article by saying “full-body motion sensing device” instead of “Kinect” for generalizability, but I left it as “Kinect” to keep it more readable.

PPS. While searching for hugging gifs, I came across the double-date hug masterpiece below. Tons of subtle interaction going on here – I love it. Make sure you watch it a couple times, looking at each person. A game about showing strong dislike while still being socially polite? I’d play that.

(From Crushable)

There are “buckets” of paint on either side of the space. One can grab paint and draw it all over your body and your friends!

Only two people can play at a time. “Sorry”.

Download the code here (incredibly incredibly half-assed; we made it in 2.5 hours):
http://code.google.com/p/kinectbodypaint/

Uses the Kinect SDK 1.5 (easy to convert to 1.0). Currently, hit-testing between points uses the 2D pixel distance, not the 3D spatial distance. This can be awkward as you pass your arm in front of your body. I might update this later. However, if you want to mess around with the code, let me know!

Credits:
Dustin Freeman
Andrey Mokhov
Ivan Poliakov
Christian Holz

Completed on time, and does what we want it to.

There’s been a few check-ins that have been very aesthetically oriented, focused on refactoring for neatness, or on renaming project files to remove confusing references to sample code we’ve borrowed from. This is for a project that needs to be ready for a certain large-scale art event in Toronto in a few days.

In the past, most of the code I have written is for a some crazy prototype that I need for a demo or a video or a study before a nearby deadline. I’ll either throw this code away, cackling, or spend a long time cleaning it up it for further work after the deadline passes. This cycle: (very pragmatic crunch coding, optimizations/improvements only later) has strongly affected my aesthetic.

Case in point:
I had to write a function that rotated an array representing an image by 90-degree increments. This is just an O(n) loop where I’m just transferring pixel values from one position in the array to another; I have to solve a mapping problem. The 180-degree rotation is the easiest, since you just to reverse the order in the array. The 90 degree and 270 degree rotations are a little harder. I got the 90 degree rotation working, then paused. My TODO list is full of requests from people I’m collaborating with. I would take me at least 5 minutes to test and debug the 270 degree rotation code. So, to rotate by 270 degrees, the function recursively calls itself to rotate by 90 and then 180 degrees. I felt plagued by guilt for a couple seconds over the blasphemy, but the function worked perfectly and the performance hit is negligible since the images are small. Now that’s good software according to me.