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I "master" these tracks by listening to them on my Polk Hampden Bluetooth speakers and then again on the Alesis monitors upstairs. It's a fairly simple process: I just play the track on my computer and fiddle with volume sliders and maybe EQ a bit until things sound alright.

Christin came downstairs earlier today as I was "mastering" M45 on the Polks. She gave me a little light-hearted crap about the sharp 2-4 snare (or clap) I have a tendency to use. Or, rather, she tried. By clapping along on the snare hits... but she got confused. Which: Good! M45's a bit of an experiment with using a non-standard time signature that you shouldn't really notice unless you do something like count along with it.

Anyway. The goal wasn't to trick Christin. I've just got to listen to these tracks outside of my headphones a bit. It's funny how different they can sound — mainly drum loops that sound fine in the cans will come off way too hot from speakers. Especially that sharp snare. And other sounds can easily muddle together and tend to require a little EQ separation of volume nudging to kind of open back up and sound nice.

Onward.

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My worst musical tendency — if I could put my finger on one habit I'd like to get out of — is attempting to solve problems by just layering on more and more sound. It's funny how I see a similar pattern when I do criticism on student technology projects: "Adding more 'stuff' to your projects isn't going to fix the basic problem. Adding a comments section or a 'find your friends' feature isn't going to suddenly make a bad app idea good." Which is to say: I could stand taking my own advice.

Anyway, I like complexity in sound and creating a kind of "sea of synthiness" is kind of the point of many of my tracks. But I've still found it helpful lately to really consider pulling things out (or slicing parts of things out) when my sonic ideas aren't properly gelling.

Stereo B started off cluttered. Too many layers. Not enough space. Just kind of a boring mush. When I first sat down to work on it, I wanted it to be much more mellow and atmospheric than Stabilizer, just to get some variation. But the track just wouldn't go there, so eventually I moved in the opposite direction, added much stronger drum loops and a buzzy bassline to kind of hold the thing together and took out or trimmed most of the other layers. Posted here is the result.

As usual, Stereo B is probably worth a listen in headphones.

Enjoy!

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So I've never really posted my sonic noodlings on my blog. No idea why. Just felt out of place. But. At the moment I don't really have any other outlets for this stuff. I'm obviously not playing full live sets on any kind of regular basis (or ever), and it's been a few years since I've participated in a Laptop Battle. So the only option is to just dump stuff on the internet.

Stabilizer. It's a bit of a nonsense name, chosen more out of the need to just choose something — anything — when saving a track project for the first time. Now I've been staring at that word for a week and, well, nothing better has come to mind. The track started off as just me messing around with the EVOC PS vocoder built into Logic Pro X — that forms part of the burbles that go along through most of the track. And then almost everything else apart from the drum tracks all come from Alchemy — also included in Logic. (It's new. At least, I'd never really messed with it. And I like!) Anyway, the foundation of the track, the rather basic eighth-note bassline and mostly unchanging kick-snare with a peppering of clicks probably comes from my being in a bit of an off mood when starting this little project and just bluntly hammering out notes. It seems to form a predictable foundation upon which all of the other blippy chaos can bounce around. (Worth a headphone listen, by the way. Might sound crappy on laptop speakers.)

Oh, and I decided to use The Clearing Stages nom de guerre instead of the usual DXM. Time for a change!

Anyway, if you listen or download, like it or hate it, feel free to drop a comment. Curious if anyone else finds this stuff interesting...

(A quick aside: I found it interesting just how little I knew about the artists behind these two albums. I know each pretty much note-by-note, beat by beat, from start to finish. I love 'em — and they were both integral to my adolescent formulation of what good music was. But Richard D. James? Kevin Shields? Ambient music scenes in the early 90s? Noise rock in the late 80s? I grew up in Austin, which has a lively music scene, but this stuff might as well've been happening worlds away. I picked up some broad strokes about these people and scenes — stuff I'd gleaned from the occasional article that would crop up or bit of biographical information a friend was circulating — but not much detail. I mean, I got into SAW2 soon after it came out and got into Loveless in 1996 (relatively late for that 1991 album) — both times (essentially) pre-internet, pre-social media. Obviously pre-Wikipedia, pre-Twitter. Fan sites existed. And magazines. But musicians and artists weren't yet the hyper-accessible trans-media properties they seem like today. It's easy to argue that a little mystery about the individuals and scenes these albums sprung from might've actually made them more compelling and interesting. Not having details lets the mind go wild. But. Lately I've also enjoyed pulling the curtain back a bit and getting a taste of the Official Story.)

Anyway, it turns out the guy behind the 33 1/3 series, Marc Woodworth, teaches writing at Skidmore College — including classes such as "Writing Rock." And in 2015 he released a book called How to Write About Music, a collection of readings, writing assignments, and little educational/inspirational bon mots from other professional writers, all organized as one might organize a writing class. So I've been chewing through that. And really getting into some of the pieces. Some highlights: Charles Aaron's live review of Hole performing their first show after Kurt Cobain's suicide, Kim Cooper's track-by-track review of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Luke Turner's article culturally situating (and defending) the albums of Enya, Thomas Sayers Ellis' interview with Bootsy Collins, and John Jeremiah Sullivan's profile of Axl Rose. That's a long list. It's a good collection.

And so. I actually think it'd be fun to try to write one of these short 33 1/3 books. But I've never really attempted to write about music before. Odd, maybe, given my backgrounds in both creative writing and creative, uh, musicianing — I used to run live digital music events and performed "laptoptronica" (as the kids called it) regularly while living in Austin, if you weren't aware. But the two disciplines rarely intersected for me. And I'm not really a music historian or anything. When I listen to stuff, my musician's ear always has me picking apart why the sounds work together, what creates the energy, the mood, etc. Cultural context, artist biographies, funny stories about the recording process — that kind of stuff sometimes flies over my head. Maybe that's my programmer's mindset: trying to understand things by disassembling them into their atomic functional parts. Or maybe I've just been blind to a major element of the musical-cultural experience. Regardless, I've decided to try something new, here, and tackle a writing prompt and write a track-by-track album... review? Not really a review. Reaction. I'm picking out and album and listening to it a few times straight through while I write.

I selected an album that fit three criteria:

1. It's significant to me. Pointless to spend time on music I don't give a shit about.
2. Doesn't have too much criticism or interpretation built up around it, at least as far as I'm aware. It's a bit obscure, but by no means unknown.
3. But, nevertheless, could legitimately be considered both accomplished and musically important for its time. (Although I'm trying to limit further research about the album until after I write this, so who knows what the "official voices that matter" have to say...)

The title of this post gives it away, doesn't it? Okay: Orbus Terrarum by the Orb. (Dear Spotify, "Orbvs Terrarvm" looks silly and makes the album hard to find.) The album came out in 1995, my junior year of high school — just as I started becoming seriously interested in electronic and ambient music. I read a quick review of it in Rolling Stone magazine, I recall quite clearly, and bought it soon after at Waterloo Records down on 6th and Lamar — my neighborhood record store. I actually found it quite opaque at first, but stuck with it and eventually it grew into one of my favorite albums. I mean, here we are.

Going into this, I actually know few of the official details of the history or production of the album. Or even who, exactly, made it, apart from the fact that "Dr.(?)" Alex Paterson was (and remains) the key member of the Orb. And I actually kind of prefer it that way, for now. Maybe if I land that lucrative book deal with 33 1/3 to write a short book about Orbus Terrarum I'll dig into that stuff. Here I'm just taking the album at its sonic face value. Reacting to it. Playing around with it. And offering maybe a slightly different way of thinking about how to listen to it yourself — maybe how to deconstruct it into something more manageable if this kind of music isn't really your bag. Or maybe this'll just be a silly failure of an experiment and I'll just wind up embarrassing myself.

Orbus Terrarum

The Orb's 1995 ambient/dub album Orbus Terrarum is clearly about "place." The Latin name ("The World," roughly) alludes to global maps of the Renaissance, the time when rudimentary medieval mappae mundi were giving way to cartograms with increasing detail and realism that actually made their blank spaces that much more interesting and mysterious in contrast. Orbus's cover art is exactly this: Renaissance-era maps with a golden optical illusion that spells out "Orb" if you squint right. I love this packaging (but then I've always been a bit of a geography nerd). The tracks titles are all relatively simple place names (apart from the final oddball, "Slug Dub"). And the overall sound is obviously quite naturalistic, in spite of the computers and synthesizers used to create it. Wetness. Marshes. Frogs. Animals. Sunlight. Nature, of sorts. But tempered with the harsh and mechanical. Gears. Metal. Robotics. In actuality the album's quite subtle, maybe even a bit self-same — it waffles between a few distinct moods, but I actually find it kind of tough sometimes to pinpoint exactly which track is which. The big vocal samples are signposts ("Get back in," "Listen to the radio," "The slugs!"), but otherwise the album's tracks kind of blur together. They're long, for one thing, averaging eleven or twelve minutes a pop. And there's certainly very little that could be considered catchy or melodically memorable in the pop music sense, except maybe a couple of the dub bassline grooves or the chintzy piano sequence that kicks off "Oxbow Lakes." You can't exactly hum these tracks. But if put your head into that sound (literally: use headphones) a rich, layered landscape opens up —peaks and valleys, rhythmic alignment and disjointedness, sonic expansion and contraction, abrasion and moments of calm. And the overall arc of the piece becomes clear: From serenity and anticipation. Into motion. Tensions between the natural and the mechanical. Clash and explosion. Aftermath. Epilogue.

The whole idea of an album that could create a cinematic, environmental experience was a bit mind-blowing to a teenaged Josh. Obviously I had been very exposed to pop music and various flavors of electronica (which in the early-mid-90s was still mostly fairly simplistic beats/synths/samples stuff). I had been getting interested in more freely formed ambient or "sonic wallpaper" albums, psychedelic chill-out stuff like Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 and more "academic" thought music like Brian Eno's Music for Airports — stuff that could really be anything, structurally, and often worked best as a kind of soundtrack for other activities. Despite often wearing the "ambient" tag, Orbus Terrarum sounded the opposite of this waveform wallpaper: It's intensely textural, but the sound fills everything. It's sound as environment. As light. As objects in space. Filling space. The Orb certainly weren't the only ones forging this path — the Future Sound of London's Lost Cities, for example, offered a similar but more urban post-apocalyptic sort of experience. But Orbus really stands alone, as far as I'm concerned. It's an important album. And not just for me personally, but also as a work that pushed forward and opened up the possibilities about what this new electronic music for the 90s and beyond could be. Not just throbbing, repetitive dance music. Not just weird experimental tone poems and background frequencies. A cinematic world of sound.

Hit play now.

Valley

A rocket engine igniting, a sleek train disembarking, a dreamy submarine plunging into the deep — or some combination of the three... "Valley" launches us on our voyage into the mysterious terrae incognito of our yellowed and time-worn map. A hazy voice from mission control chimes in authoritatively over the intercom: "Get back in." After a couple of minutes we slip the surly bonds of the mundane world and the sonic space opens in a shimmering metallic and burbling dub rendition. This is our first introduction to the pulsing alien landscape in which we'll spend the next hour or so. Over the next few minutes we get plants and animals. A jungle. Dripping leaves. Whistling birds. "We are in complete harmony," a new voice informs us about three minutes in. "We have learned patience in 200 million years." (Leonard Nimoy, fun fact.) Then a thrum, our bridge into a chunky departure from the sleek sound of the first half of the track — mud, heavy wood. And then after a minute or so, a return to the original silky dub groove. "Valley" world-builds, sets the scene. It paints a portrait of a clockwork world. The Orb extends the comfortable laid back sound and groove of traditional dub, erecting around it an electronic scene in which those dub elements can live like a characters. The insects, frogs, and bird warbles allude to Lee "Scratch" Perry's habit of vocalizing animal coos over his warm, smokey tracks. The sound is happy. Content. So far, so good. Eventually the sound fades into sparkles and light looping melodies, the bass line that's held us together so far loosens up and we fade into an old familiar favorite...

Plateau

A jaunty announcer breaks in like a big band leader on Mars, amplified by a club sound system half underwater. Even if you're not familiar with the Orb's oeuvre, you're hopefully becoming aware that they don't take themselves completely seriously. I mean, they're serious from a production standpoint. (Alex Paterson is a doctor, after all. (Not really. (I think.))) Each sound on Orbus feels meticulously crafted. But the Orb ain't above producing the sonic equivalent of dorm room black light posters or weird kitchy psychedelic shit you'd find at your neighborhood 90s-era head shop. The Orb's productions of this era are oddball stoner whimsy at heart. Stacked on top of meaty beats, of course. Anyway, after the vocal aside we're dropped back into the world introduced in "Valley." But now in a clearing, an open space. (A plateau?) It's lush and beautiful, but on an edge. Flashes of light. Froggy sounds in a distant marsh or bog. We can see quite a distance. The rolling dub bassline from "Valley" rejoins us three minutes in and catalyses the disparate sounds into a soft-edged groove. The world shines. We're going somewhere. Silvery hi-hat and metallic samples fill in the gaps — our sleek silvered future train, again — along with the dub bass and delay-echo drum patterns that characterize the whole album. Over the many minutes of "Plateau" the looping textures come and go and twist around in relatively subtle ways. You can lose yourself in the detail of the sounds that occur in the very background, behind the overt bass and percussive mix. The layering and depth of sound in Orbus is incredible. (And I sure-as-hell hope you're listening along on good headphones. For heaven's sake, this is not an album to be enjoyed on your little Jambox Bluetooth speaker thing.) We're traveling, as if on a train made of the lightest metals — a machine of percussion and bass coursing through wet and hazy nature — nature which exists on its own but is also uncannily in resonance with the rhythm of the machine. The scene slowly mutates, transforms. Then at nine minutes in we get chopping vocal samples and the whole effect becomes more tightly constrained sonically. More mechanical. A touch claustrophobic. A tunnel? A factory? Transition. Was the halcyon picture painted earlier to be trusted? Should we be alarmed at the ramping intensity and wailing voice refracting through the scene? "Plateau" ends with a somewhat deconstructed version of the basic rhythm of the track. This angular, robotic version of the previous dub bass sequence hangs around until the last 45 seconds or so and then we're open back up into sunny synth string stabs and light-weight metals. Back to peace.

Oxbow Lakes

Orbus Terrarum oftentimes gets categorized as "ambient" — understandably. But "Oxbow Lakes" is the second track in a row that starts with a jarring scene change (and it won't be the last). Ersatz piano, this time, which stands out as simplistic or child-like against the detailed mix that characterizes most of Orbus. As a genre, ambient generally avoids these sorts of jarring moments. But that's not what this album's about. Whatever else they may be, the Orb have always been first and foremost in my mind a dub outfit. The basslines. The echoed drum tracks and stoner silliness. And the best dub kind of plays at being both "ambient" music and having textures and sounds that pop up in the forefront and give you elements to actively listen for. I mean, you can put on Orbus quietly in the background and it won't necessarily distract you (I've on many occasions done homework to this album), but unlike most ambient it requires a close listen to truly appreciate (yes, reiterating this point for the jillionth time). And beyond that, as a "concept album," it rewards deep listening and experiencing the overall structure of the piece. And I think these attention-grabbing bursts a part of that. Listen up! Here are some cheesy fake piano sounds. Or a strange sample of speech. They definitely give your brain something to latch onto when first listening to the album. They divide the work into chunks. And while the Orb might not be taking themselves totally seriously, they are making an effort to craft contrast and drama as we transition from this drugged out synth piano strain into a more complex sound almost like the rumble of internal organs. Digestion. But, again, robotic. And not sexy Ex Machina robotic: These are massive pneumatically-powered constructions moving as if just barely under control of themselves. Wobbling iron giants. Although soon enough — around five minutes in — the scene begins to change once more. Another passing threat? A bassline begins and the piano makes a return, but softer. A blinking counterpoint melody takes the foreground this time. Something very much like computers. Logical sounds floating in the haze of the world.

Montagne D'Or (Der Gute Berg)

We're jarred aware with another sample — "...leaving for Constantinople tonight..." — ear-ticklingly flanged and phased. And then the curtains open to a sparse and burbling pond of sound with little more than a twangy county guitar to keep us connected to civilization. We sit for a minute and then float into a lush, symphonic wash of pads and synth strings. Voices echo around, hard to understand. But adult. Male. Vaguely paternal. We sit in this still place for a few more moments — sounds ebb and flow, more digital bayou than mountaintop. But we're not yet going anywhere. About four minutes in: A bit of quiet, then something like a clock-radio alarm or an electronic phone ringing (but not a cell phone — it's 1995). A starkly urgent mechanism in contrast with the languid scene we've seen so far. It compels us to move. With determination, but not afraid. Into battle. The previous two tracks have offered soft-edged previews of conflict between the natural and the mechanical, but now we're going into the shit. The sound becomes a pulse of focus washed over with vectors of echoes and delays. And then. Around six minutes into the track, a monstrous relative of our friendly dub bass co-traveller from tracks previous pounds into the scene. It runs alongside our fleet metallic train with an entourage of burbling flies and insects. This bass isn't threatening, necessarily, but it is massive. Seven minutes in, war drums signal another change in mood. Then warm horns of alien mysticism. A reprieve. Calm yourself. Before the voices. And then the bomb drops: It's war. At eight minutes into "Montagne d'Or" all hell breaks loose. The dub bassline plays the role of enemy machine, not just out of control but smashing and stomping beats over everything else in the sonic frame. The silvery metals are harsh and banging. War horns blast from the sides. Machine parts beat against one another. Noise. Stress. The machines begin to come apart, rhythms break down. Iron limbs flail. Collapse. Until we're left with an abrasive and almost entirely inorganic feedback loop squealing in our heads. Are we done? Is it dead? Are we dead? Are we safe? Cables snapping. Acceleration. One final release of energy: A damaged, lopsided missile launch into up into the night sky. A harsh metallic explosion far above the land.

White River Junction

...And the inevitable return to earth. The remains. Fragments. Chunks falling from the sky. Splashes in the soft marshy life. Quiet again. A paternal voice speaking with the calming authority of a self-help tape: "You have a deep and sincere respect for yourself..." Soon a new, female voice enters, providing a counterpoint: "Listen to the radio." Looped over and over, eclipsing the male speech. (Both samples come from the track "Listen to the Radio" by plunderphonics band the Tape-Beatles, by the way.) This second voice is more enticing. Subversive. A bit sexy. But also artificial: Just a bit of tape playing through and then rewinding with a hiss. Given the abstract story of nature versus the machine that I've tried to concoct, we might interpret this as the machines taking another angle on winning the day. Their physical forms from the end of Montagne D'Or destroyed, they now resort to psychological warfare. Setting up one voice as clearly manipulative and fake, but then introducing a second voice as if to say, "That voice is just trying to manipulate you — listen to this second voice. It knows what's real and what's not." A false flag. But we're not buying either. After a couple of minutes we leave the voices and come upon another sonic clearing — serene with sunlight and burbling creatures, frolicking, splashing. Nature. Then the silvery hi hat metals from tracks past rejoin us. As does the "Listen to the radio" loop, faintly — more in the background this time, integrated with the beat. A precursor. About four minutes in, the halcyon groove mutates harshly. "White River Junction" follows the template of previous tracks: Starting easy and traveling into scenes of increasing violence and intensity. Flashes of harsh light forebode the change. The machine finds its body again. A fat acid bassline stabs into the scene amidst other tympanic sounds of factories and mechanical organs (stomachs and hearts, not Hammonds). The machine grows. But this machine feels somehow more friendly. By six minutes in we're still bumping along to this awkward, lopsided groove, but it doesn't feel threatening. Maybe because this contraption's not out of control. Thick chunks won't fly off and crush life. About six and a half minutes into "White River Junction," the machine sort of stops. The acid bass belches are sill with us. The looping voice commanding "Listen to the radio" returns. Percussion drops away. And with two minutes left in the track, we transition again into a sunny synths chord progression. We're safe for now — this excursion into danger didn't go quite as deep as before. The track ends with a third vocal sample, an hypnotic description of a descent deeper and deeper into sound and sleep... "Each sound around you carries you deeper... Deeper in sound and in sleep..." Fade out.

Occidental

"Occidental" initializes with a howl and machine rumble — a taste of the loud grind and rumble that comprises most of the track — washed over with wind and water, taps, and slices of voice. This holds for a moment and then revs into motion: A rave for forty-foot robots. Large banging beats. Size. Laced with rays of light and sunshine. The fits of industrial-digestive rumbling, again, as if our titanic dancers are also fighting to hold together their form. Three minutes in we get fragments of humanity — a plea for help, some loop referencing Mississippi. They last just a moment before dissolving into unintelligibility. And then the over-large rave returns. Although it remains both powerful and unstable, unable to keep its power up in face of the myriad competing sounds. Five-and-a-half minutes in and we've fully decayed into a banging sort of four-on-the-floor. And then a reboot back into our main groove. Given my "battle" theme, this track is odd. It's machines pretty much straight through. The natural scenes elsewhere on the album — swampy frog-filled marshes, for example — don't appear at all. About six minutes in, the rhythm fatigues and disassembles. For just a moment before catching a second wind. By eight or nine minutes in, though, the situation has clearly deteriorated. The aggressive, animalistic bassline thrums along — like a tiger pacing back and forth in a cage. Counterpointed with a processed guitar effect sounding almost like the bray of a large land mammal or dolphin on Venus. Has our new continent been scorched to nothing? Did the machines win? This new space sounds organic, natural — but not wet and lush like the jungles earlier. This is a dry and barren landscape. You can't live here. The final few minutes of "Occidental" put a period the of the main sequence of Orbus with a final shock of sound that zips around and seems to finally rip the world apart. At the end of the track, the entire thing compresses violently to a single point. With one final creepy voice sample. The end.

Slug Dub

Almost. Ah, the slugs.  I consider this track an epilogue more than a denouement. We've had an intense experience. We got through it. Let's get weird. Obviously this track stands out from the other tracks by it's name: "Slug Dub" is merely descriptive (a dub track with some slug-related samples) and doesn't point to a place on our map of Orbus Terrarum. Much of the general timbre and instrumentation matches what's found all over the rest of the album, of course. But "Slug Dub" is framed by a single strange story about the eponymous slugs, seemingly (or maybe actually) taken from what sounds like a British radio show for young children. It's cute, in that rather surreal way that makes sense for children but rings somehow sinister for adults: Babies, mothers, and grandmothers. Setting traps with Thomas. Sluggy laughs. Lettuce. Little Tim. And such. (I can't find the original sample, but the Internet seems to think it's from a radio play called "Billy Bobtail" from the BBC Home Service in the 1960s. Alex Paterson was born in England in 1959, so entirely possible he heard this as a youngster.) (Also, Miles Davis' "Calypso Fremino" (from Get Up With It) is sampled underneath the vocals. Which I only mention because the Orb have noted Miles Davis as being a favorite and you can pick out his influences in their sound outside of actual samples. (Another fun fact: Parts of the bassline in "Calypso Fremino" sound very, very much like the underworld soundtrack from Super Mario Bros.) Anyway. This odd story continues for a minute or two, ending on an angelic and sort of mysteriously extra-terrestrial note. And then into the "Mariah" section, a light and airy segue that mutates into a bumbling dub march with synthetic kettledrums laying melodies on top — and our old friends the silvery metal hi-hat cymbals from elsewhere on the album. Four minutes in and we're stripped down to a relatively tight and minimalist (for Orbus) groove — although we haven't fully escaped the sea of background burbles that wash around even the lightest parts of the album. Halfway into the 16-minute track we're still rolling on this copacetic dub groove. At 8:40 things begin to break asunder. The synth kettle drum still makes appearances, but the dub bass and percussion have gone gritty and distorted, maybe a bit bit-reduced. Until around ten minutes, when we really start dissolving into something else entirely. The beat totally fades out and the sunshine strings return. We reach the end of our slug tale. The slugs eat the lettuce leaves. "Sweet music while we eat." A happy ending? Or not? Do you feel like reading anything into the choice of the slug sample? Would you like to make some bold interpretation? Is there any? Or is it just shallow weirdness?

We can ask this about the whole album, as well. Is there actually something deep happening in Orbus? Does the structure mean anything? Have I read entirely too much into it? Would the creators corroborate any of these images I've described? It's entirely possible any unifying theme I've noticed just comes from the musicians natural ebbing and flowing of the sound — that any seemingly overarching "narrative" is just something I'm adding on my own, like a stoned teenager focussing in on some trippy poster and reading deep philosophy into it. "This means something." But it doesn't. Which is actually kind of besides the point.

So a couple of years ago I attended a conference here in NYC called "The Future of Storytelling." I loved it! And I've probably told you stories about it, if you know me in person. But I remember one group conversation at one of the panels. About abstract narrative. Can a rollercoaster (for example) have narrative? Most people in the room seemed to argue "no" — without concrete details (character, place, conflict, plot, etc) narrative can't exist. But I disagree (in a way that helpfully now defends my strange notion of spending time over-analyzing this album from 22 years ago): The power of abstract narrative is that it allows exactly what I've done. It provides a framework of emotion and energy — the human mind will want to fit concrete details to that. The brain can hardly help it — we see humanity and stories in damned near everything we experience. A rollercoaster (or an instrumental song) triggers your brain to fill in the blanks. Which is neat. And can be fun. So whatever: Maybe this is all a waste of time. But I think it's a neat way to kind of pick apart the album. Even if my idea that the album kind of depicts a struggle between the natural and the mechanical is a bit forced, just going through the exercise has given me a chance to really give Orbus a close listen. And maybe it's given you a new way of hearing the album. Or an entry point to hearing it for the first time. Which, even if you think I'm totally off-base, well, at least making that judgment requires actually thinking in detail about the sound.

At any rate. 12 minutes into "Slug Dub" and we're back into a nice calm valedictory dub groove. We're approaching the real end, here. With two minutes left the album begins its final descent into normalcy, sobriety. Fits of hallucination still attempt to loose themselves, dub bass, echo-delay drums. But nothing hangs together. Eventually the world of Orbus Terrarum breaks down. And it's just us, again. Sitting around at home with the headphones on. Maybe in need of a snack.

It's a cool, clear night. Chilly considering the warm weather we've been having during the day, lately. Christin's inside binge-watching Orange is the New Black, a show I don't care for. I'm sitting out on the terrace, listening to the latest well-textured Oneohtrix Point Never album on our little black Jambox speakers. Which makes for as good of an opportunity as any to write out a few notes about my trip to the Sonar music conference in Barcelona last week. I'm going to keep it brief, but I did want to put a few notes about it on my blog since writing up my travel experiences seems to be the one thing I consistently do, here...

Mark Thompson was responsible for my going. He worked on an app called The Bermuda Tapes, which launched last year. He got to attend SXSW earlier this year after it had been nominated in the music app category (which it, sadly, lost). After that some folks at Sonar apparently discovered the app and invited the team that worked on it out to Barcelona to give a talk. No one else could go. Mark had an extra pass. I've been wanting an excuse to go back to Barcelona. One two three. We're on a flight to Barcelona (by way of Philly). Left NYC Tuesday afternoon, June 10th, flight at 3:30pm. Left Barcelona to come home at 10am on Sunday, June 15th.

We arrived on the day of a taxi strike, as well, so instead of hailing a cab from the airport to the hotel after a long flight we were treated to a loud protest of cabbies clogging the pick-up zone of the airport, singing, waving flags, and setting off firecrackers. While we waited in line forever to get tickets for the damned bus...

Anyway: Barcelona was more-or-less as I left it. I've been three times previously — once in 1999 as a part of a summer-long cross-European jaunt with my then-girlfriend Abby and Sean. And then again twice during the summer of 2005 as sub-trips out of Berlin, where I spent a few months. The first of those 2005 trips was also to Sonar. The second one of those trips I flew out to Barcelona to visit my friend Jared and explore the city. (I remember, amongst other things, seeing Star Wars: Episode III at a movie theater with Spanish subtitles and hiking at Monserrat.) Anyway, the main city felt pretty much as it had before. La Rambla has been cleaned up quite a bit — it felt seedy in a bar-hopping-college-kids sort of way rather than in a pickpockets-and-prosititutes sort of way, which is an improvement, I suppose. Also: No birds. I remember the whole boulevard lined with cages of birds for sale. That's gone. But the feel of the area remains the same. Bari Gotic. Barcelonetta. Eixample from the ever-growing and tourist-overwhelmed Sagrada Familia walking up to Park G�ell overlooking the whole town. Quite the same. The bright-hot weather. The cool evenings. The humid smell of the Mediterranean.

So the conference. First, I should explain that for a variety of reasons including jet lag my sleeping schedule was hopelessly botched, so I kind of spent the week wandering around in a half-asleep fog, only occasionally lifted by blasts of the free espresso those of us with the fancy gold passes got for free at the conference. So my experiences are through that blurry lens.

The daytime conference took place entirely at the Fira de Barcelona, a big convention center situated a few hundred meters off of Placa España — where we were staying a place called the Onix Hotel — at the base of Montjuic (the mountain upon which sits, amongst other things, the Olympic Village from 1992). The conference center had a mixture of different sorts of spaces.

Just inside the main entrace was a trade show, of sorts — a large room in which an oddly organic arrangement of booths had been set up for groups to show off their various electronic music-related projects. Some were students or groups representing university programs showing off various NIME-style interactive music inventions, including what appeared to be a kind of DJ-like audio scratcher controlled by turning orange halfs on small plastic juicers. Some were more product demonstrations. The LittleBits people were there, for example, showing off the latest of the collaboration with Korg. There was also a small collection of tables with iPads on them to show off a handful of music-related apps, including the above-mentioned Bermuda tapes, and a guy showing off sound visualization project on an Occulus Rift — which I greatly appreciated, but also felt ultimately underwhelmed by given that looking into a Occulus Rift is kind of like looking into a blurry world as seen through a screen door, and it's just really, really hard for that to compete with traditional high-resolution displays when displaying data-art sort of stuff that requires appreciating the detail. (Works great for broad stuff like the Game of Thrones "shoot you off the wall" thing at SXSW, though.) A small presentation space had also been set up in this space, off in the corner. The first day I sat in on a presentation, here, about wearables which I kind of half-dozed through (sigh). And the last day, Saturday, all of the app people gave their ten-minute talks — including Mark. So I checked that out and met some of the other creators. Mark befriended one of the guys who worked on Radiohead's PolyFauna and a guy who just graduated from Pratt and had achieved some recognition for his collaborative alarm clock app. These were great, by the way. It's always great to hear other people's experiences being creative. I've always been one of those people for whom being creative is hard — including writing on my blog, here. I don't feel natural or comfortable doing it — I kind of work myself up for it using various tricks and techniques — but it is something which I nevertheless feel strongly compelled to do. So I'm usually game to hear about other people's processes when creating. And one thing of which there was zero talk of at Sonar, as far as I could tell: Money. It was all creativity first. What can we do? What can we explore? What's new? What's interesting? Maybe (probably) I'm just going to the wrong conferences.

So, the music. Let's just do a quick run-down, roughly in the order in which I saw them. It's late. I'm tired.

Day one. Thursday.

Machinedrum. Saw Travis play a set at the big outdoor space at the Fira de Barcelona. With a like drummer. His Vapor City tracks, I guess, which were much more chillwave (yeah, I know) than the stuff of his I heard when doing shows with him back in 2004-2005-ish. But it was good! He got a good response.

James Murphy + 2manydjs. So this was some thing with the McIntosh speaker manufacturer. In a very, very dark room (made even more so when coming in from the bright outdoors) they had set up a mid-sized octagonal dance floor with a tall Jetsons-like speaker cabinet on each side, pumping loud and crystal clear sound. I dipped in to this twice for only a few minutes at a pop (I actually found it to be uncomfortably loud) and loved it. They played fantastic tracks and really showed off the sound system quiet nicely.

Machine Variation: Bernier and Messier. When we first passed by this, it appeared to be just some kind of installation — an erratic amalgam of two-by-fours and metal dropped on the convention hall floor. Like the result of a 1950s experiment where men were given large amounts of LSD and then asked to construct a garage. We came back later and got to witness a live performance which involed Bernier and Messier, I suppose, banging around on this thing with some rough musical purpose. Clanging cacophonous rhythms. Not bad. And I appreciate this kind of stuff, I really do. But I also find that as I've gotten older I get frustrated when the concept is novel but the end result doesn't sound very interesting. I understand that visual performance is an important part of music, but visual performance alone is like a cake that looks awesome but tastes like sawdust. Notable, but unsatisfying. I respect their effort, though.

As a quick aside, this might why I find the idea of making instruments or musical toys for other people to play with so intruiging. I feel like this does allow you to play around with making musical objects that you can interact with in unique way — but without being beholden to the idea that you need to be able to product quality music with them. Meaning, if I make an instrument and give it to you and say, "here — go make a noisy mess with this" you can go make that noisy mess and enjoy it and that's okay because you're not performing for me, you're just enjoying making sounds. This allows the cake in the metaphor above to taste weird in the end, but because the creator and "audience" co-created it, it doesn't really matter. Not sure if this idea completely makes sense — it's coming right off the top of my head — but, well, here we are.

DJ Daniel Miller. Yup, the guy who founded Mute Records and discovered Depeche Mode. Good DJ set, if nothing super-memorable. But an interesting sighting, nonetheless.

By the way, during the day those of us with the gold badges had access to a VIP area off to the side of the main stage. It had a bar and some risers with pillows on them to site on. And a labyrinth of port-o-loos. And a lunch counter that served sausage, grilled veggies, and caprese salad the first day and a whole fish, eyeball-and-all, (with grilled veggies) the second. Very nice food for a music event like that.

Trentemøller. Okay. So we wandered into one of the indoor stages to see whatever this was. I didn't recognize the name, but people were flooding in. After about ten minutes of some kind of butt-awful generic synth-goth nonsense we left. Depeche Mode can pull that kind of shit off. Almost no one else can. What the fuck.

Plastikman. I respect his brand of minimal techno, and this performace was nicely put on. He stood at a booth kind of out in the audience, not far from a tall video-wall obelisk which pulsed imagry in sync with his performance. Great. Richie Hawtin does what he does very well, but I also sometimes feel like it's a bit too mechanical and soulless. This particular performance was another one where I stood there and though, "I respect this, but I'm not really feeling much otherwise."

Day two. Friday.

FM Belfast. Oh, goodness. I've enjoyed the albums by these guys the past year or so. They're a gaggle of goofball Icelanders with a fuck-ton of energy and charisma banging out synthy dance pop tracks. They had the audience eating right of their hands, as well: Jumping around, frekaing out. And in the middle of the hot day, as well. Really fun. A highlight of the event. Don't know what else to say.

Imposition. This I enjoyed, as well. A dark room with an array of two-by-fours painted white, sitting up on their small ends. In a grid. Being projected upon in synchrony with live music being performed. A little tough to describe the effect, but it worked on me. The music hit a nice middle point between being glitchy and more traditionally melodic. Unfortunately the space was not air conditioned and there were no seats, just concrete floor to sit indian-style on. But worth the experience.

Oneohtrix Point Never. Also great. Very absract. Performed in a more traditional concert hall at the venue along with a live(?) video performance. I don't exactly know how to describe Oneohtrix Point Never. It's not ambient. It's not exactly experimental in the sense that I usually use the word. Meaning, it's very definitively constructed and intentional. Just very unusual. Abstract. Hard to pin down. For me, at least. I may just lack the language or not be aware of the genre he's participating in. But I've enjoyed his albums ever since Trey Smith recommended him to me last year while I was out in New Orleans. Cool to see live. The only two problems: 1) Again, with the sleep issues I had all week I dozed a bit in the middle (dark, dark room + abstract sound = zz..). 2) One problem with having a single event with both wacky DJ dance-party stuff happening in the bright sun with flowing beer and shut-the-fuck-up-and-listen performances in concert hall settings is that drunk people having an awesome time chatting with friends and being loud will wander into the "please be quiet" space and they will not be quiet. Which is almost not even their fault. Just awkward event design. But I had to tell two guys sitting behind us chattering in Russian to please be quiet. After teaching college classes, it's so much easier to tell 20-somethings what to do.

Röyksopp and Robyn. Sonar had a nighttime event that took place away from the main city on Friday and Saturday night. We didn't go on Saturday, opting instead to do some stuff in the city, but we did go out for a bit on Friday. The nighttime events were at Fira Gran Via, another large convention center in a very, very new part of the city. I don't think this area had been built when I had last been in Barcelona — it was nothing but new, shiny metal-and-glass buildings. The Fira Gran Via has a curvy kind of molten shape to it. We cabbed out there and got fast-tracked in (thanks to the gold badges, once more) into our own special VIP zone from where we could watch Röyksopp and Robyn. The whole set was a couple of hours long — we stayed for about an hour. And it seemed like a Robyn set. Not exactly sure how Röyksopp figured into the mix. But it was great. I mean, pretty mainstream as large live music events go: masses of people in a large concert hall, laser lights, video walls, Robyn wailing the classics ("Call Your Girlfriend" was especially memorable). Good, clean (well..) fun. After tiring of Robyn, Mark and I grabbed a couple of beer and then used the special gold-pass-only walkway over the vanue that quickly got us from stage to stage. We didn't really stick around to watch any other music in particular, but we did enjoy checking out the venue. On the far end they had bumper cars set up and a large, carnival-esque, neon-lit food zone set up. Otherwise, just stages. The far stage was outside, so we hung around for another beer or two and enjoyed the weather.

Christ. I've been writing on this for over two hours. Let's wrap.

What else happened? The first night Mark and I walked down La Rambla and through Bacelonetta to the beach and grabbed some bites to eat at a little cafe on the water. And the last night instead of going to the Sonar nighttime event we ate at a tapas-sushi-fusion place I found called Doble ZerOO. We sat outside in a little plaza in the Bari Gotic part of town that was full of little kids running around, yelling, playing soccer, etc. Felt surprisingly neighborhood-like for being smack in the center of old Barcelona. Decent sushi. Nice to sit outside and have some beers.

Oh, and the World Cup kicked off while we were in Barcelona. Finding places to watch was actually a bit of a challenge, so for the Spain/Netherlands game we would up in an American-style (sort of) barbecue place in the weird bullfighting arena-turned-shopping mall right across the street from the hotel. Spain got abused. No one seemed particularly upset.

We twice, then, went to an English-style pub near La Rambla to watch games. I forget the name. We enjoyed the place, but the English hooligans were definitely out in force, so we had to deal with a lot of that. Thus I didn't mind when England also lost. And some guy drunkenly called me "Hodor."

And we finally made it back to New York City. After nearly a full 24 hours of travel, including a wait of several hours on the tarmac at LAX. I hate flying, so I won't say much about this trauma except that our flight took off in Auckland at 11pm New Zealand time on Friday (5am NYC time) and we got to the apartment at about 3:30am (NYC time). The only interesting thing to really happen during that time was that I watched Captain Phillips (and enjoyed it) and our plane between Auckland and Los Angeles had hobbits painted all over it. Dignified. We got home, the cat seemed excited to see us for about fifteen minutes before switching back into her total apathy mode, and then we crashed out. Only to wake this "morning" at 1pm feeling like butt. Got my standard El Monterey burrito and latte from Lodge, and now I'm in the mood to write.

So that final day. We did have all day on Friday to explore NZ between checking out of Underhill at noon and dropping off the rental car at the airport around 7pm, so we went to the Kiwi House in Otorohanga to (finally) check out an actual kiwi bird. We met a great spotted kiwi named something like "Awe" or "Ate" (ah-way or ah-tay) — I forget at the moment. They're nocturnal, so we had to go into a special large dark room area where they ran day and night backwards so the birds would be up while the tourists were coming through. This kiwi was a female on the large side of things — maybe 20lbs or so, mostly in the form of a round lump of downy feathers. With a spindley beak coming out of the front and two legs coming out of the bottom end like sapling trunks, terminating in big, clawed feet. Kiwis are fairly silly animals to watch. We watched her being fed and she'd run around excitedly with an off-kilter bouncing gate, sometimes doing a funny little hop move. Kiwis are very animated, it turns out (for the few hours a day they're awake and active, apparently), and have surprising personalities that come out. They're apparently quite feisty and territorial, as well, and get crafty when it comes to trying to explore their caged-in spaces and escaping. Anyway, that was a lot of fun. The Kiwi House also has an extensive collection of birds and lizards to check out — and we saw an eel feeding — but that felt fairly standard-issue. We were there for the kiwis.

Otherwise, Friday just involved a lot of driving. I think we were getting worn a little thin on it and were getting a little grouchy, but only because we'd driven so much over the past few days and New Zealand highways tend to be winding and inherently confusing since they have to cut through such complex terrain. So it was frequently difficult for me to get my bearing and feel comfortable that we knew just where in the hell we were. Christin played navigator, though, and did a pretty good job given the limitations.

We stopped for a late lunch at a place near Otorohanga called the Big Apple — which seems like a diner from the outside but actually turned out to be some kind of large buffet / kid entertainment zone with a large balcony and a rather extensive farm out back with kiwifruit plants, an orchard, chickens and roosters running around everywhere, and a little quail pen. I had some pancakes and Christin had an English breakfast, and we were on our way.

And then we drove back to the Auckland airport, dropped off the car, had a couple of beers (and watched some rugby) while waiting for the plane. And that was that.

So.

I realized I missed documenting just one other day: The day we drove from the farm at Kynjarmin to Havelock North. I think I blogged that day before we left. At any rate: We wandered up to Jenny's and her husband's house at Kynjarmin to use the wifi on their porch as we had been doing, but I ran into Jenny as she was driving out and she hadn't turned it on. So I ran into Christin and was wandering back to our house to get ready to leave when we ran into Jenny's husband driving in his truck out of the area where they kept their pigs. He was quite chatty and seemed to enjoy talking politics and musing about whether the United States might ever decide to break up into smaller parts and telling us about how New Zealand's isolation drove a lot of its culture. He's the one who noted how it had been difficult for New Zealanders to get out of New Zealand in the past, so whenever a foreigner turned up they were always very curious to pick their brains for news. And he mentioned how New Zealanders had a crafty streak brought about from the fact that back in the day boats bearing resources would only show up every six months or so, so they had to learn to made do with whatever happened to be on the island. I did reflect something we found almost universally true about New Zealanders: They seem both crafty and very, very chatty.

So that day involved a bunch of driving, but we did take time to see some natural wonders, as well. We visited Huka Falls, a kind of cross between a waterfall and roaring rapids which we found quite beautiful, and then we took a hike around the nearby Craters of the Moon. So. The Craters of the Moon is essentially a big, open, rocky field with no trees or vegetation higher than a couple of feet. For the most part. It's an active volcanic zone, not unlike White Island in some ways — the area is littered with smoking (steaming) holes in the ground and bubbling pits of mud and larger, deeper crags with boiling evil deep inside of them. Given the hot day with no shade and the literal heat coming out of the earth, we found the hiking experience interesting but ultimately exhausting and not really worth it given that we'd just seen the 100x more impressive White Island. A few bubbling holes in the ground just no longer cut it for us. We need entire volcanic islands.

But, anyway, those were the highlights of the day. At least as I remember them now, back in the dining room zone of our apartment back in NYC.

One last thing, though.

I actually almost completely lost track of days in New Zealand. Hence the lack of references to specific days in my writings. Being on vacation will cause that to happen naturally, but having days almost completely offset from our "natural" New York City days also caused problems. We kept having to play games, like, "well, it's Wednesday morning here, so it's [ponder] Tuesday afternoon there" when writing e-mails and communicating with the outside world. So let me end with a kind of official schedule of what happened on what days. New Zealand days. New Zealand is 18 hours ahead of New York City right now, so you can almost just subtract an entire day to know what day of the week it was in New York. If that makes sense. At any rate:

• Thursday, February 18th: We arrive at 5am. Wander around Auckland.
• Friday: Waiheke Island.
• Saturday: Drive from Auckland to Kynjarmin farm near Matamata.
• Sunday: Hobbiton.
• Monday: White Island.
• Tuesday: Drive from Kynjarmin to Havelock North. Huka Falls, Craters of the Moon. Pipi's Pink Pizza.
• Wednesday: Biking wine tour in Havelock North / Hawke's Bay area.
• Thursday: Long drive from Havelock North to Underhill near Hamilton. Stopped over for lunch at Lake Taupo.
• Friday: Drive from Underhill back to the Airport. Kiwi House. Heard Pharrell's "Happy" on the radio about sixteen times.
• Friday #2: Travel 22hrs from Auckland home to NYC.

(Yes, that final Friday lasted 42hrs for us.)

PS: Here's a screenshot from iPhoto which maps where I took each photo. The red pins represent pix. It gives a good overview of where in New Zealand we traveled. (Click to enlarge.)

And that's that. Now it's back to the real world for a bit. And then off to Austin on Tuesday, thus completing our record-setting attempt at visiting every city in the world with more than a million people that starts with "Au."

Well, I guess I just took my final shower of this trip. In something called a "washcave" at the place we're currently staying, a hobbit hole sort of place with no power called Underhill. "Glamping" is the term, I suppose — a portmanteau of "glam" and "camping." A couple (Jessie and Craig) have a farm outside of Hamilton, and there?s a small lake in a valley a bit of a ways from the house with a hill into which someone has carved a cozy hutch and set up for visitors. We arrived later than expected yesterday evening (around 6:30, after about eight hours on the road — way more than we anticipated) and Jessie drove us down to the spot on her ATV with a trailer attached for our bags. We got down here, relaxed for a few minutes (I half-slept while Christin poked around), and then explored a bit, enjoying the scenery and making fun of the animals (a collection of sheep — eating sheep, not shearing sheep — live in the yard adjacent to the lake and hut where we're staying). After that, we lit the million candles that provide the only nighttime light and Christin prepared some lamb racks on the grill (I helped out with a corn and tomato salad), we ate and had some wine, and then hung out under the stars for a while chatting. Hamilton's not a big city, but it's close enough to light the sky at night. So the stars weren't quite as spectacular as they were at Kynjarmin near Matamata, but you could still see the band of the Milky Way and, at any rate, way more that you can see from our terrace in New York City. Jupiter still hung as the brightest object in the sky, just off the shoulder of the inverted, southern-hemisphere Orion.

Quick note: I've been informed by Christin that I'm making up facts about this trip. So please consult her for the real story. It's possible we're not even in New Zealand.

So, yesterday was take up mostly by driving here from Havelock North. We left there around 11am and took a quick break at Lake Taupo for a hamburger at the Jolly Good Fellow right on the lake — and so Christin could get a few minutes to wade in the water. Lake Taupo, to note, is the volcanic crater left over from an eruption around the second century AD, if I remember correctly. (Wikipedia this to confirm.) The eruption put enough ash into the atmosphere that apparently the Romans, Chinese, and South American civilizations at the time made note of it. None, of course, knew of New Zealand, which had yet to be seen by any humans when this happened. Anyway: It's a huge lake amidst low-flung mountains. Very nice. After that we had a frustrating four-hour drive to our current spot, made worse by a fire that had on of the major highways closed off. We've been seeing "extreme fire warning" signs on the highways all around here, so I guess we weren't incredibly surprised. Annoying, nevertheless.

Continuing back in time... We came here from Havelock North, a town on Hawke's Bay that reminded Christin of Sarasota. But with vineyards and mountains. We were told that the area is the wealthiest in New Zealand, which seemed right. And it also seemed like the oldest. The only other folks staying at our bed and breakfast — a cute if somewhat over-saccharine place that kind of felt like your grandmother's idea of a romantic getaway — were all retirees on trips of at least a month. The b&b served breakfast each morning to the people staying the the three rooms at the place (the rest of the house being the family's home), so we got to meet our co-residents: An older Canadian couple and Australian couple (the latter of whom sounded rich-rich) the first morning and an English couple the second morning. All very nice. One funny observation about the people, here: the New Zealanders (and Australians and Canadians we mostly come across — very few Americans) have been incredibly chatty. Jenny's husband at Kynjarmin attributed NZ chattiness to the fact that it's hard to get off the island, so whenever foreigners turn up, the locals feel the need to learn as much about the world from them as possible. Obviously it's easy in the 21st century to get off the island and learn about the world, but not long ago I suspect you were pretty much stuck here. No cheap overnight flights to the States. Anyway, I pegged the English couple as being English before we spoke because they were the first people we met who were super-outgoing. They seemed shy and didn't break the ice until I asked where they were from. Very nice people! But I found it funny how people fit their national stereotypes sometimes.

I only have a few more minutes until I have to wrap up. It's 11:30am and we've got to be out of here by noon (when Jessie arrives on the ATV to wheel us out of here).

The one full day we had in Hawke's Bay we took a winery tour on bikes. We rented a couple of bikes from a company that dropped us off at Black Barn vineyard at 11am and scooped us back up at another vineyard (name forgotten) at around 4pm. We hit a couple of vineyards, then stopped for a snack at a cafe called Tandem — where we actually ran into Jenny, the proprietor of Kynjarmin where we stayed previously, and her sister. Quite a coincidence. They're very nice people, so we hung out for a while with coffee and scones and chatted. After that, we biked on a raised trail through many vineyards down to the coast where we found yet more vineyards. We had a drink at Elephant Hill, a very sleek and trendy spot near the water, and would up getting some food at our final vineyard — name forgotten. We had a very talkative guy give us our tasting and we then sat outside and ate whilst defending our food for a very curious rooster. The place was mostly under a tent and had a casual vibe that fit us well. That evening (after a rest) we had fancy dinner at Craggy Range Terroir and that was that.

The previous night in Havelock North (our first night there), just to note, we grabbed pizza at Pipi's Pizza, a very pink little restaurant recommended to us by the woman who ran the bed and breakfast. I had a Hawaiian pizza. Good food. But literally everything was decorated in bright pink. And you had to grab your own beers from the fridge.

I don't know if I got every detail, but time to run. Our flight is at 10pm, so we've got some more stuff planned today. Probably have to write about that when back in New York.

For the past three nights we've been at a small farm called "102 in the Grove" or "Kynjarmin." Both labels are on the signs. I'm not sure which actually refers to where we're staying (although Christin might). It's a beautiful place, tucked in the rolling hills between Matamata and Tirau in the kind of north-central part of the North Island of New Zealand. Our residence looks straight into a large corn field ("maize," they call it) and up to some pastures with a roaming mix of sheep and cattle. The whole area is lush and green — fairly idyllic.

We left Auckland on Saturday by car. With me driving. Which meant I had to quickly get a hang of driving on the "wrong" side of the road. And, for that matter, in the "wrong" side of the car. After a few days, now, I've pretty much got the hang of it. But that first day. Wow. It really shocked my sense of orientation for the first hour or so. Driving on the left-hand side of the road at first seems profoundly wrong. I had to force my brain to shut up and just do it the first few times. And my first big left turn I did accidentally turn around the cars stopped in the center lane of the cross street as if I were in the states and turning into the right lane. Christin shrieked. I quickly corrected and aborted the turn. No harm done except I clipped the side mirror of a parked car (no damage). Other than that snafu, we've been doing pretty well with it.

And driving in New Zealand is complex. There are very few highways of the sort we're used to in the States around here — it's mostly two-lane highways that wind around over and through the hills and mountains of the area. They're beautiful — every single spot around here has a nice view of some sort or other — but they can be a challenge to navigate. Especially with our limited mapping options (we have no mobile phone data, so we're limited to printed maps and whatever map data I can cache on my phone before we leave — just like the original Maori people used hundreds of years ago when they first settled this area). But all-in-all it's been fun driving around.

On our drive from Auckland to the farm, here, we took a bit of a scenic route out of the city and stopped at a little grove of food tents on the side of the road to pick up snacks and supplies. And coffee. And then we hopped on the highway through Hamilton, where we again stopped off. But Hamilton was a bit of a surprise. So, the entire country otherwise has been completely charming. Everything's kind of like a cute and laid-back mix of English and California cultures. (I know they wouldn't call it Californian here, but that's the closest comparison I've got.) Northern Californian. Maybe like the Pacific Northwest in the States. Auckland does have a very Seattle sort fo vibe to it. Anyway, everything's well taken care of and feels kind of generally happy and positive. Except Hamilton. Which Christin and I agreed felt like a decaying southern town. We stopped into the mall to get some food and to get oriented (and take a break from the left-side driving) and it felt like malls I'd been to in the 1980s in dead parts of Alabama. Tacky. Depressing. Empty. We mentioned it to Jenny, the woman who owns the place we're currently staying and all she really had to say was that Hamilton is one of the few cities in New Zealand that's landlocked — both physically and culturally. So strange. But. Enough ragging on poor Hamilton. I'm sure it's not all that horrible, we just had quite an experience.

Otherwise, the day of the drive we just made our way to the farm, here, and then stayed put. Jenny's little dog (Shelby, I think, although I'm probably mistaken) made quick friends with us, so we played around with her: I'd throw a stick I found at the edge of the corn field out and she'd bounce after it and then, instead of returning it, would shred it down to its small constituent parts. Christin could get her to return with small chucks we could continue to throw, which went well. The pup would excitedly spring about while one of us wound up our shot and she'd then bolt off into the olive trees to chase down the stick part and return with it. (They also have olive trees at the farm and make olive oil). Shelby is not allowed in the house where we're staying, so she spent a good amount of time sitting right at the edge of the wide doors that opened out from the main living room and kitchen area to the yard and corn fields outside. (And as I write this, she just walked by the window I'm sitting in front of, probably looking to play fetch some more.)

There's also a cat that comes around occasionally and another older, scruffier looking little dog that has come by once or twice to say hello. A couple of nights ago we were sitting in bed (around 10pm — we're on a very unusual (for us) 10pm-7am sleeping schedule) and the motion-activated light kept flicking on and off outside the big double-doors that open from the bedroom to the outside world. First flash: No animals. Second flash: Cat. Third flash: Cat and dog. You probably had to have been there. Incidentally, this was also the one clear night we've had (although the daytime weather has been spectacular). So the night sky was probably the most star-filled I've ever seen. Almost like a canopy — no space not filled with a mist of stars and galaxies. Pretty amazing. My parents might get that effect in Newfoundland, but I don't think I've every seen something like that in the States, even in rural parts of Texas miles from nowhere. (Also: Different constellations in the southern hemisphere.)

So, okay. The tourist stuff.

Two days ago in the afternoon we went to Hobbiton. Yes, this is just about the most tourist-trappy think we've done, here. (Probably in running with the Sky Tower in Auckland.) And it's expensive (NZ$75). And it started off poorly, having to wait at a dumpy little rest-stop sort of place with expensive beers and hideous-looking food. So I was worried. Especially when the bus came to pick us up to drive down to the set — a frumpy, white bus that looked like it'd be brought in from Yugoslavia circa 1983 and hosed off. Oy. But. Once we got down to the set we had a really good time. It's yet another extremely attractive plot of land, but this time done up with permanent hobbit holes and buildings. It's the actual place they used to film the Lord of the Rings movies, and it's extremely well kept. Our tour guide gave us a walking tour of the forty-four fake hobbit hutches and the various other elements in the area — trees, lakes, little farmed plots, etc. All, again, very adorable and fun to photograph. (I've got a whole collection, now of Christin standing in front of a wide range of round little doors.)

So we toured around for a couple of hours and then got our free beer at the replica Green Dragon (exterior from the movie, but not the interior). We also had a snack. Then caught the bus back up through the dry, rolling, sheep-laden hills back to the home base. Then back in our car. We decided to go into the city of Matamata to find dinner. Christin wanted pub food — fish and chips. We wound up sitting in the large window of a pub called the Horse and something — no fish and chips, but Christin got an open-faced steak sandwich and I got some pasta. It was alright.

Oh, another quick aside: That first evening we also drove into Matamata to go grocery shopping and Christin made a couscous and venison meatballs dinner for us here at the farm. Which we ate while a small gray dog circled the table and begged for a bite.

Yesterday was a long day. We took a day trip out to see White Island, the active volcano off the coast, here. We got up early (well, not really given our current sleep schedule). But around 7am. And got driving around 8am. And reached Whakatane after a couple hours on the road. The drive, again, was pretty nice. We passed through Rotorua and drove especially winding roads over the mountains that separate the interior areas of the island from the northeast coast. But we made it just in time to buy our tickets and hop the boat out to the island with about thirty other people. The boat ride lasted about ninety minutes. Only took about fifteen minutes for me to start turning green, so Christin and I had to relocate from our nice perch up on the second floor of the boat down to the less tumultuous rear of the boat — the infirmary, I later called it, because the staff kept sending seasick people back there and by the time we got to White Island, there were maybe a half-dozen (or more) pukers back there. I, just to note, never actually threw up and actually did alright. I just had to sit still and concentrate outside the boat.

So we got to White Island. White Island's the real deal. There's no tourist information center. There's no dock. There's a century-old mostly destroyed sulfphur factory that's a few rooms large, and that's it. So we had to go in groups of a dozen our so in a little black inflatable motorboat to actually get to the island and then climb over some large-ish roacks to get onto the island proper. Which, again, is not the usual vision of a south Pacific island. White Island's a dead crater (actually two connected dead craters) which nothing living in in. It's all various shades of light and dark gray with stark yellow patches here and there from all of the sulphur. Dead. Like being on the moon or Mars. Very alien. And as we walked closer and closer to the caldera, there were more and more pools of bubbling mud and little holes in the earth spewing steam.

Our tour lasted a couple of hours — oh, and we were given hardhats and gas masks before leaving the boat — always a positive sign — the hardhat we were required to wear and the gas mask we could optionally weat if the sulphur smell got too intense. Which it did a couple of times. (One of our two tour guides also gave us hard candies to suck on, the idea being that they'd keep saliva in our mouths and eclipse some of the sulphur flavor in the air. Which they did, I guess.) So we walked around in our group for a couple of hours. Saw the main opening of the volcano (which, interestingly, is a kind of volcano that only spews ash up into the air — no lava.) Saw the old semi-demolished sulpher factory. Tasted various elements of the volcano: Sulphur powder. Sulphur water. Iron water. Water with all sorts of minerals in it. And such. And then back to the boat for a ruturn trip. We would up making friends on the return trip — I sat next to a couple from Wellington near the front of the boat and Christin chatted with some guy from Stuttgart. The Wellington couple had been to North America on a five week trip and were really, really into talking about sports. The guy was very interested in all American sports. I believe he was a book-maker and she did some kind of rubgy-related work. We talked for most of the trip back (and ate the little box lunches the tour group gave us for the ride back) and had a good time. I didn't get nauseous at all, thankfully, and we even ran into a pod of dolphins that swam along with the boat for a while. This is an excellent adventure if you ever happen to be in the area, by the way.

So then back to driving. We drove up to Tauranga, also on the coast, and finally got that fish and chips we were looking for. And a few beers. At a water-front pub place that had a trivia night going on. (What's the color in the middle of the German flag? What four-letter country is Timbuktu in? Etc.) And then drove back to the farm at night, which proved rather harrowing. The left-side driving plus curvy mountain roads plus having a difficult time sometimes figuring out where were made it tough. But we got home around 9pm. And after an attempt to watch TV (and only really finding old SNL episodes to watch), we gave up and went to bed.

And, so, back up this morning. I just went for a run, played a little fetch with the dog, and am now writing this!

PS: I edited the previous post about Auckland to include some photos.

We're checking out of the quite nice Heritage Hotel in Auckland this morning. In about an hour. We just finished our third breakfast at their rather extravagant breakfast buffet (featuring — amongst the usual eggs, sausages, and cereal sorts of stuff — build-your-own miso soup and little cups of coconut yogurt with tiny turkey-baster-like squeezy things full of berry jam). Christin's downstairs doing some e-mailing and I'm up in the room making sure we're all packed up and ready to roll to our next stop near Rotorua.

I'll attach some photos below if I have time (and if they get from my iPhone to the laptop fast enough over this questionable wifi). (Note: Photos added!) But here's the basic outline of the trip so far:

We arrived in Auckland around 5:30am after a little over 24 hours of travel time. Six hours in the air from New York to San Francisco. Twelve from San Francisco to Auckland. I've been on a few flights of more than twelve hours, but I think this may have actually been the easiest. The six hour jaunt had so exhausted me that I basically slept through it. I usually have a very hard time sleeping airplanes, so thank god. Anyway, we arrived at the hotel just as day was breaking, checked in, and sat down for our first breakfast buffet. And then took a walk down to the waterfront and poked around the city a bit. The waterfront's nice, but not super-exciting. This, in fact, kind of describes Auckland. It's a lovely city, but it seems like you could get your fill after just a few days. We passed by some start-up tech conference happening at a small convention center on the water and looped around the various docks and inlets to find a place to sit and have some coffee. After what felt like a day's worth of wandering, we'd only reached about 11am.

So we went to the Auckland Sky Tower, figuring we'd get that out of the way. Very cool! It operates more-or-less like every space needle-like structure in the world. You go up, marvel at the view, take some pictures and head back down. It had a couple of unique features, though: First, you can jump off of it in a kind of rig that's a cross between a zip-line and a bungee cord. We didn't do this, of course, but mounted above one of the windows inside the viewing area was a red LED sign that would read "2 minutes to jumper" or "30 seconds to jumper." So every few minutes we got to see one of these ballsy people swoop down in front of the glass on their way down to a target painted on the street-level below. The second unique feature: When walking around the outer ring, some of the floor is glass. So you can see straight past your feet and down fifty or sixty stories to the street below. I managed to summon the will to walk across. Christin did not.

After this we finally got to go to our room and take a shower and a rest. It felt like we'd completed a full day, but I don't think it was actually past 1pm. So we took our nap and then headed off again, this time to Auckland Domain, which seems like one of their main parks (although Auckland seems to have many parks — it's a very green (and hilly) town). We cut through Albert Park and through the Auckland University campus to get there. Quite a hike, but neat to see a different part of the city. In Auckland Domain we sat and watched some casual cricket matches being played — and tried (unsuccessfully) to suss out the rules. We then walked around and bothered some fowl at the duck ponds and tried to enter the Wintergarden glass houses (closed earlier in the day) before wandering up to the Military Museum (I think) and then down back to the city through a path called "Lover's Lane." Lover's Lane is, in fact, a dank trail through dense trees and the loud, shrill howl of a million cicadas. One thing I've learned about New Zealand so far: There are cicadas everywhere. And they all are making loud, shrill buzzing and clicking sounds. It's overwhelming sometimes. We experienced this during the summer in New York (when we left the city), but the woman we asked the next day at one of the vineyards on Waiheke Island said it happened every year. Wow.

Anyway: I've got to wrap up, here. Our first evening here we went to a place — I forget the name and the internet at the hotel SUCKS so I can't check online — just west of the Hotel that had a few interesting kind of upscale comfort food places set up in a parking lot kind of area. We went to one called "The Food Truck." I had a red beet burger along with a 50/50 — half beer, half seltzer water — and Christin and "lamburger" and what tasted like a virgin Pimm's cup. Very good place. Very Austin-like in atmosphere, as well, we thought. Then back to the hotel and, after a half-hour or so on the rooftop deck where Christin sat in the hot tub and I watched an episode of "The Soup" under the stars (and rapidly color-changing Sky Tower), to sleep. Finally.

That was two days ago. Yesterday we had our usual breakfast (and I ran for a half-hour-ish) and then caught the ferry to Waiheke Island. The day was extremely warm and sunny, which was great after the months of ice and snow in New York. So we ferried over — through the million gorgeous islands that pepper the bay, here — and then caught the crowded little bus to vineyard #1, Goldie's Vineyard. That was the plan: Catch the bus from vineyard to vineyard and taste the wine and maybe hit a beach. Well, we got to win-taste at one vineyard. Then learned that the bus ran hourly, so we decided to hoof it to the next vineyard. Which took an hour. In the sweltering sun. Which was lovely! But exhausting. We did meet up with some other guy also walking between vineyards and chatted a bit. He was from Philly and making the rounds from beach to beach and vineyard to vineyard. So we did finally get to vineyard #2, which featured archery and a beer and lunch menu, in addition to wine. So we just parked it there until 5pm. I had another beet burger and a couple of beers. Christin had wine. And we watched the people playing chess with those big, over-sized piece and bocce ball (which they call something else, here). We didn't get to shoot anything, but we did finally wrap up and catch a bus to the beach at Oteroa — very nice — and then we walked back to the ferry terminal in the late-afternoon sun and caught the ferry back to Auckland and, from there, to the hotel. Which we arrived at completely sunburnt and exhausted. Evening dinner plans were off. We ordered room service and watched the second half of the 80s movie "Commando" (starring Arnold Schwartzenegger) before dozing off.

And now, this morning. Another breakfast. Cleaning up the room. And then getting out rental car out of Auckland for the rest of the trip.

I'll post photos later, when I get the chance. (Note: Done!)

Anyway, I had a few quick impressions and opinions that sort of fell into the "too long for Twitter" bucket, so I figured I'd dump them here. Note! This is more of a rant than anything. It's definitely not an attack on anyone or any conference. It's just some thoughts that have been building up in my little pea brain and that I need to get out...

And so.

Early in her talk Kristana asked for a show of hands: Who, amongst the educators present, considers themselves a "gamer?" Only a few hands went up. Now, the term "gamer" is loaded and people (self included) have a habit of not responding to "show of hands" questions at conferences. So this definitely wasn't a scientific survey. But although Kristana kind of moved on from the point, I thought it got to the heart of one of the difficulties in many parts of the "gamification" movement in education and elsewhere: These "gamifiers" oftentimes don't play enough actual games. And if they do, they're not doing so critically. And so problems arise:

1) They don't know what's out there. For example, there are, in fact, very popular AAA games that deal with topics you can teach in high school. Civilization V comes to mind as a very obvious example. It uses elements of history to color the game world -- real people, places, and things -- but the core gameplay is built around a particular philosophy of history, one which (I would think) you could very easily identify and critique with high school or undergraduate students. This is just one example. If I had to take a stab as to why people don't dig deeper to learn about existing game design practices and culture, I might argue that "games" are still perceived by many as frivolous and shallow activities. Checkers! Hearts! Hide-and-seek! So instead of being treated as a subject with just as much depth (or potential depth, at least) as literature, cinema, or music, people assume they "know games" via only a very surface-level exposure. Which leads to...

2) They don't really understand what a "game" is -- or what a game can possibly be. Almost all of what I saw in the talks had to do with either alternative measurement systems to the usual American A-F grading system or with incentive systems to get kids to do the same old boring work they'd otherwise be forced to do. The concept of procedural rhetoric made an appearance or two (although I never heard the term used), but generally the "gamification" I saw seemed to entail mostly just reskinning the same old educational strategies. Putting cheese sauce on the broccoli, so to speak. And this is actually fine. If it leads to the kids eating more broccoli, I won't complain too much. But it vastly underestimates the power of game mechanics as educational tools. Again, to use Civilization V as a reference: The core game mechanics -- how players' civilizations grow and decay in the game -- can be discussed in an educational context. It's not just "write a history essay and get 50 points if you do it." That's the same old broccoli, but with cheese sauce. Civ5 is more like learning how to cook vegetables properly in the first place so the kids don't require a pile of cheese sauce to eat right. To stretch the metaphor.

The lack of real-life context is, I feel, one of the major impediments to kids not being interested in some things. "I'll never use calculus in real life." "Who cares if I write a five paragraph essay about Millard Fillmore?" Games can simulate this context by creating situations in which these skills are required to play well. And I'm not ever talking about computer games. I think the board game "Diplomacy" could be another great one for high school students to play and then discuss their experience in the context of other historical diplomatic entanglements: The Cold War. World War I (Diplomacy's setting, sort of). Being able to reliably pass a mid-sized orange ball through a ring of metal suspended ten feet in the air is just as esoteric as being able to take the square root of a number, when it comes down to it. Except kids have a shit-ton of context about shooting baskets that they don't have for simple math. The former can make you in a rich celebrity with women and cars and your own line of sneakers. The latter? Who knows. Some job that's probably boring. A well-made game can add some context that makes the simple math, in this case, relevant to the student.

Also, I'm not convinced that you're going to reach tuned-out kids by substituting one "gamification system" -- the traditional American A-F system -- with another one that involves points and badges instead of letters. If I don't care about an A, I don't care about 50 points and a badge that says I know what a pronoun is. The trick -- the very hard part of game design -- is getting people to give a shit. There are strategies for creating engagement, but I really think this is the "art" of game design. You can learn techniques, but you really just need to have a sense of it and personal intuition about what could work. And room to test your ideas in the real world, of course. How do you create the building blocks to do this? Play games. See what works on you. Watch people play games. See what works on them. Then get to creating.

Side note: If you're giving a talk about "gamification" in education or elsewhere, please don't quote Jane McGonigal. She's a lovely, bright woman who I'm sure does good work. But. Her book Reality is Broken is a mess and many of the talks I've seen her give have substituted colorful boosterism for serious thought. Reality is not broken. Game design is not a panacea. Game design is also not an "epic win" (a term I hate). Game design is a practice with a set of tools that can be used well or used poorly. For good or for evil. It's actually quite easy to make shitty games. (Trust me.) And "gamification" is used all the time for nefariously manipulative purposes. Businesses and political groups use all sorts of little game-like tricks to get you to fall in line and do their bidding (especially technology and social media companies). So you must realize that you can make things worse by introducing any kind of "gamification" into your educational toolkit. I might guess that the biggest way to make things worse with educational games is to make them distracting so students have fun and remember the game, but don't retain anything of what you were actually trying to teach.

There's an increasingly tall pile of awesome books about game design which are very thoughtful and very accessible. They deserve your attention if you care about game design. For example: New to game design? Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun is a fun and quick read. Ian Bogost is also great. His How to do Things with Video Games is a good one for getting your brain stewing about different ways to apply game design.

Anyway, this is just a rant and not targeted at anyone in particular or even this conference in particular. It's just some frustrations I've had at these kind of events and at these kinds of talks in the past. I love it that teachers have picked up on game design as a tool to get kids engaged and learning. And I hope this becomes more common and that some great new ideas filter into the academic mainstream.

PS: I don't care for the term "gamification." It's a catch-all that's too vague to be useful. If you're trying to get people to do or not do something, that's "incentivization." If you are trying to increase engagement with avatars or somesuch, that's "personalization." Making things more exciting for the senses could be called "adding juiciness." If you're trying to teach via the game mechanics themselves, "procedural rhetoric" is a good term. Etc. I think using these more precise words make it clearer what you're actually attempting than plain old "gamificiation" does.

End of rant.

These days my musical exposure is a little more catch-as-catch-can. I buy stuff off of Bleep and iTunes and recently started using Spotify — all of which have been great, but all of which kind of suffer from a similar sort of overwhelming wave of options. Having access to all music from forever is kind of a mess if you don't know what you want to listen to. Bleep's recommended lists are somewhat useful, but iTunes' and Spotify's are absolutely not. (The iTunes front page currently most prominently advertises music by Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus, for example — music literally no one wants to listen to. Spotify's main page advertises John Meyer and then goes on to suggest I might enjoy some artist no one's ever heard of named "Beck" — then recommends that maybe I'd like to revisit Color Me Badd's "I Wanna Sex You Up," since it was released at some point during my youth and because I have never once in my life wanted to listen to Color Me Badd's "I Wanna Sex You Up.") Social recommendations are somewhat helpful. iTunes' now defunct Ping proved a useful simply for the fact that the three or four people I knew whose musical opinions mean the most to me happened to use it. And at least on Spotfiy I can go find friends with fairly good taste and see what they're listening to. But it's still all kind of decontextualized and just kind of feels random. When looking for new stuff I sometimes also hit up sites like Pitchfork that I've respected in the past, but again: I don't read these regularly and the whole experience still feels kind of arbitrary. (For new music, that is. If I just want to reminisce about high school with some Smashing Pumpkins or Toad the Wet Sprocket, well, Spotify's great.)

Anyway, one exception to this is Soma FM. They've been around since around 2000 — at least, that's when I remember first discovering their site. (They still feature that hazy photo of a solitary DJ spinning in front of a wall of night-lit windows, and it still kind of takes me back to the House of Commons days when I first listened to it regularly. It's a great picture.) I still listen regularly today because it's well-curated by someone with good taste. And because they're reliable about finding good music that I'm not familiar with. And not in some "an algorithm did this" sort of way: A real person's on the other side of that site, picking music and putting it together in a certain order. It's great.

See, there's an art to curation. And I feel like this is being ignored in the aggregated and auto-recommended world in which we live. Obviously Pandora and Spotify Radio and whatever this new iTunes Radio thing is — those are all examples. But even "recommendation engines" that try to figure out what you'll like based on what you've already listened to or what your friends like. And (to pick on Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus some more) I have to believe that pop music as it exist today is an example of some kind of exploit of this system. In a world in which there are no curators, all you have to do is build up the illusion of popularity and suddenly all the other algorithms (software-based and human-based) kick in. You're on Clear Channel's radio stations all over the nation every fifteen minutes, so of course MTV has to have you their awards show and American Idol has to have you as a guest and iTunes has to put you on their front page and people will think they have to listen to you because 1) they don't know any better about how to find music and 2) most people really don't seem to care about it, anyway, so who gives a shit — they'll like Katy Perry as much as they'll like anything else. Yes, this is my extremely snooty-about-music side.

And this aggregation actually creates another set of problems, in addition to just turning music curation into something mechanized and impersonal rather than something human and expressive. It appears to hurt the economics of music (unless you're a Katy Perry or Miley Cyrus sort). The power of those who would champion good music has dwindled. And if there's no point in championing good music, no one will (except a few die-hards or the rare handful who can make a living at it). Why waste the time? And so we fall into the hands of the algorithm. It's weird: We live in a time when the tools of music creation and distribution have been put into the hands of pretty much any middle class person on planet Earth who wants them. Garageband comes for free with every Mac. And yet, I suspect that more great music than ever before gets created and literally never heard by anyone beyond the creator and a few of his or her (or their) friends. Strange, right? That there's an unprecendented amount of creativity happening and the fact that we're locked into algorithms that promote Beck and "I Wanna Sex You Up" (to me, at least) force it to remain unheard.

And so, Kickstarter.

It's got all sorts of problems. I never felt particularly comfortable giving money to projects from people I don't know, but I have used it to support friends. I also have never given money to help people on musical projects. My friends are more of the "I'm making a game" or "I've got a wacky idea" variety, so I just don't have much opportunity. But, Kickstarter's warts aside, I do understand and respect what they're trying to do. (Or, at least, what they were trying to do before they seemed to become a semi-corrupt start-up launcher.) By putting the money ahead of the creative process, they force you as a consumer to face a choice: If this band or musician (or whatever — but I'm sticking to the musical theme, here), if they don't get the money they need to make their album, then no album. So if you respect them and want to hear more from them, chip in! It turns the issue of piracy and the near-total devaluation of recorded music on its head and makes you feel like you're working with the artist and pitching in, being a part of making this thing happen. And then once you've put money into the project, you're invested. Literally. But also figuratively: You'll listen. You'll experience. You'll think about it. "Man, I gave $10 and that album was awesome." Or "I can't believe they took my fucking $10 and released this garbage." Emotional response. The Laptop Battles I used to take part in did something similar: They'd force the audience to judge and therefore emotionally invest. And once you've done that, you'll listen. You'll pay attention. You'll care. And, of course, Kickstarter helps fix the economics by making music feel like something that needs financial support to exist, rather than something that just floats around out there and, y'know, doesn't hurt anyone if I just pluck it out of the air for free.

I've signed up for another site called Drip.fm that I think aims to solve the musical curation problem in a different way. (Maybe other services do this, but it's the first I've seen.) It works like so: They work with labels and make a subscription service where you pay a certain amount every month to a given label and you get, say, an album a week, every week. I subscribed to Morr Music's channel, for example. It's $9.99 per month. Each week I get an e-mail with an album for me to download. Now, I can't go download stuff they've released in the past. Just whatever they release as long as I'm paying. And it's not all new stuff. It's a mix of older albums, compilations, and newer releases. But it feels curated in a good way. I like Morr Music — they're a Berlin-based label that releases a lot of mellower electronica and electronic pop. And though I don't know all of their artists (although I do know a bunch), I do trust them to find good stuff. And so far it's worked: I'm a couple of months in and have found maybe four albums (out of seven or eight) that I really enjoy and hadn't been exposed to before. ("Don't Want to Sleep" by FM Belfast has been the soundtrack to several of my recent runs. And I'm listening to "Mister Pop" by The Clean right now — it's good writing music.) And it doesn't feel random or arbitrary — the music fits together in a sort of thematically oblique way and subscribing kind of makes you feel like you're supporting the label and a part of a cool little album-of-the-week club. And, like Kickstarter, I think it has the potential to change the economics a bit. It's almost like a rolling Kickstarter: Instead of supporting one project, I'm kind of giving ongoing support to something that's already churning out good work.

Potential. Kickstarter works, I guess. Although it has opened up a whole new universe of exploitation channels. Drip.fm and whatever competitors it has — I don't know if these will survive. Drip.fm seems very new. And simple. They offer a few dozen labels and the service is very simply designed. Which is fine. But it feels like they've got just a few people working on it and I can easily see the business model falling apart for them. (The last music service that I thought made a really interesting stab at a new way of listening to music — theSixtyOne — seemed to die soon after I decided I liked it.) They're in that rough space where it's probably unclear whether the experiment will work or not.

But I hope it does. I think more people should be aware of the importance of curators, and promoting well-run labels is a great way to do this. Algorithms can be great for some things, but I have found them frustrating when it comes to music. Maybe it just makes me sound like one of those cranky farts bemoaning the loss of the album in the age of iTunes, but I have to believe that people would enjoy music more and understand it more if it came to them through curators — advocates with opinions about good music and the resources to express themselves through musical selection. Any service that seems to promote this I will support. Honestly, I'd pay way more than $9.99 per month. Maybe other people would, to. I hope.

Around 22nd street and Broadway I started feeling a little lightheaded. Probably just hungry. Let's get to the restaurant. Then, as I hurried my walk I felt dizzy. Then my heart started fluttering and I quickly became very quickly dissociated. The audio in my ears sounded weird, so I pulled out the headphones. I walked quicker, just to get some food, I suppose, but also out of fear. Then tingling in my fingers, hands, legs. My vision tunneled. My heart went berserk. My mind fixated: A heart attack. I'm having a heart attack. I'm dying. I started dialing 911 on my phone and got as far as "9" and couldn't get any further. So I stumbled to the first random stranger I saw walking towards me on the street, handed them my phone, and said in a strained voice, "I think there's something wrong with my heart — can you dial 911 for me?" He was another guy about my age (Merlin, I think he said his name was), and I imagine his first reaction was a kind of confused annoyance — crazy people are not rare on the streets of Manhattan — but as soon as he realized what was up, he became immediately helpful. Called the ambulance and communicated between emergency dispatcher and me. Had me sit down. Kept an eye on me. Asked if there was anything I needed. I calmed down. My heart stopped feeling like it would explode. My limbs stopped tingling. The ambulance eventually arrived and a couple of EMTs helped me inside, stuck a bunch of plastic monitors all over my chest and arms, and gave me the once-over. I mentioned the heart thing. "Your heart seems fine — healthier than mine, in fact," one of the EMTs informed me. I hadn't eaten all day and had consumed three iced coffees. And had been running and walking around almost all day, apart from the meeting with Bob. Probably just a blood-sugar crash mixed with a little dehydration. No need for the hospital. Get something to eat. Go home. Relax. Maybe take it easy on the caffeine. I got a hot dog from the closest street vendor and took a seat at one of the tables set up on Broadway by Madison Square Park. (A very nice spot on a weekend afternoon, by the way.) I called my parents and Christin (who was in Florida) to let them know about it and see if they had any thoughts on the matter. I still felt weird — and very freaked about my heart — but I eventually caught a cab home and tried my best to relax. Going to sleep that night I still felt on the edge of something catastrophic. Like my heart might just go out on me at any moment and I'd fall over dead. Doom.

I didn't die. In fact, the next day I felt better. Christin arrived at home. I laid low and didn't really leave the apartment. Until Thursday. We decided to go walk and get some breakfast. I got about a half block before it came on, again. Light-headedness. Heart beginning to accelerate (although nothing as severe as the first episode). I immediately sat down. It got worse. Call a car, we're going to hospital. Which we did. Good old Wycoff Heights Medical Center, the same place had my fingers fixed after those two episodes a few years ago. Emergency room. I sat there, still thinking that, once again, I was having some kind of minor heart attack. I say for almost two hours while those idiots apparently forgot about me. I was somewhat out of it, feeling like shit and like I might die, but if I remember correctly they basically forgot that I had been sitting there. My understanding is that they're pretty much supposed to clear the way when someone thinks they're having a heart attack, time is so much of the essence. Maybe I'm wrong. But either way: They took their sweet time. I finally made it into the ER, where I got probulated for about six hours. My blood pressure was through the roof. No one seemed to have any idea what was up, except to keep informing me that nothing appeared to be wrong. Except the blood pressure. Which as I calmed down also came down.

My regular doctor was unavailable, so I made an appointment with someone else at his clinic the next day and went in with Christin. "You had a panic attack" were basically the first five words out of his mouth.

Okay. So I finally had a firm diagnosis. I assume Manhattan physicians see panic attack patients about, oh, a dozen times a day. I don't have any numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if New York were the panic attack capital of the United States or the world. Or the solar system. Probably not the galaxy — many of those new exoplanets they're discovering look pretty stressful. I'm honestly surprised the EMTs didn't suggest it — and I'm not reassured that the doctors at Wycoff Heights couldn't figure it out after a day of running tests of me. Especially since, now that I've read a thing or two about panic attacks and general anxiety disorder, I realize just how common panic attacks are. Two good friends have had them and I didn't find out until after I started talking to people about my experiences. Tony Soprano had them (and so did his son). I just today happened to watch a video interview with one guy from the web comic Penny Arcade about his history of panic attacks. People talk about panic attacks quite often in all sorts of media — and knowing about them makes some of the behavior of over-scrutinized celebrities make more sense because they can make you act really, really bizarre. I never thought twice about them, but now that I'm acutely aware of their existence, I see stuff about them everywhere. Weird.

So I had a couple of panic attacks. And not particularly major ones — I didn't collapse or anything like that. And only the first one had any major symptoms like the racing heart and tingling in the limbs and the imminent threat of fainting ("syncopy," as the cool kids (doctors) call it). But it triggered my awareness of something else in me which had been building for a while: general anxiety disorder. The term sounds silly, but it's definitely a thing. Ever since that panic attack I've had problems doing things like going out and doing things in the city, I've had problems being in crowded spaces, sometimes the idea of walking a single city block seems unsurmountable, sometimes for no reason I'll just feel Fear and have trouble holding my shit together — it feels like I'm literally about to die sometimes. Or, failing that, like I'm going insane. Like there's something I can feel broken in my head. My understanding is that people with this condition often feel like they're about to have a heart attack or like they've got a brain tumor. I understand why this is — that's how I felt. That's how I still feel sometimes, although now I know enough about what's going on to be able to see through the shitty illusion my anxious brain is creating for me. I'm not dying. I don't have heart problems. I don't have a brain tumor. I am, as far as anyone can tell me, pretty healthy. Even my blood pressure is even just fine, despite the initial fear that there might have been some problem there.

I'm writing this because one thing that has helped settle me when I'm experiencing a rough patch is to get online and read other people's experiences with panic attacks (PAs) and general anxiety disorder (GAD). I've never been one for using the internet to diagnose medical conditions, but PAs and GAD are mental issues and, as far as I've been told and experienced, the way to deal with them is to not get caught in their downward spiral. The slightest trigger can build into a spot of worry which can cascade until you're having a full-blown attack. The trick is to understand when you're experiencing a little trigger and to psychologically not allow yourself to go down the dark path. Reading about how other people have experienced something similar and helped themselves helps me.

My primary doctor, when I finally got to see him a few weeks after the event, likened it to being chased by a bear. Like: A bear jumped out at me from the clear blue and scared the living shit out of me. So for a while, anything that reminds me of that experience will cause me to clench up, fearing that once again the bear will leap out. Again: Sound a little goofy to write, but it's relatively accurate. I guess it's a very, very, very light form of PTSD.

I joked about this with Christin, but it's sort of true: We watch Dexter, the show about the serial killer who also works for Miami Metro Homicide. He regularly blathers on about his "dark passenger." That's kind of what this feels like. I'm not going to murder anyone, of course, but I feel like there's something wrapped around some of the nerves in my head, neck, shoulders, and back. Something that can take over and put me in this bad state if I don't control it. That sounds cheeseball, but it's honestly how I feel sometimes. The GAD can feel like a physical thing that I want excised from my body.

Okay. So this has been going on since August — about seven months or so. And I am getting better. It's what I would call a controlled problem at the moment. I haven't had a real panic attack episode since October (I was in Austin alone and also had the flu, which all combined into an obnoxious series of attacks). While I have had some issues going out in public and going to crowded restaurants or music shows, that seems to mostly be behind me. I don't feel afraid to do basic things like I did for a while. I don't feel unhealthy. (In fact, besides this I feel quite healthy, especially since all of the tests I've had as a part of this have come up clean. And my exercise levels are also back up, which is a good general barometer. And I'm very attuned to my physical health at the moment.) I'm getting better, so I wanted to briefly discuss what I've been doing and thinking to help fix the situation.

The main fix has been a combination of going to therapist and being my own therapist. The "anxiety" in "general anxiety disorder" comes from somewhere. Work, for me, has been consistently pretty stressful for about the past two or three years. This past summer isn't the worst it's been, but I had a lot of work stress and I think it had just compounded and compounded until I finally blew a gasket. And, let me make this clear: It's not a particular client or project. I really like almost all of my projects and clients! Especially now that I've got the ability to be selective about who I work with. They're smart, interesting people who like making things. I get along with my clients. The work stress more came from how I worked. I put a lot of weight on my own shoulders when I work. I can make things much harder on myself than they need to be. I guess I don't want to get into too many specifics, but the past seven months I've been doing much more deep thinking about how I want to work and what my work-life balance should look like. I'm not a graduate student anymore: I can't just blast through projects, spending 14 hours each day banging out ideas and code. It's very stressful. And it's been, I feel, a major contributor to my GAD. So I'm working on that.

My therapist has been good. Christin pushed me towards this option, though I was resistant at first. I've been seeing her for about four months, now, and she's been good at giving me techniques for managing the disorder (like breathing and stretching exercises) and she's been good at giving me perspective when I talk about how I'm trying to do things like reassess how I work to reduce stress. And I talk about my tricks. I come up with a new trick every now and then which actually prove quite helpful with stress. For example! I guess my natural mental image of the people I'm working for is that they're somehow angry at me for not being good enough or fast enough or whatever. They're totally not in real life (for the most part!), but even when things are going great, that's an odd kind of pressure. And it's probably rooted in something much deeper in my past — the details, there don't even really matter. But there's a part of my brain that drives pretty damned hard to always better, always improve, and it's really hard for me to shut that part of me up. It's got to be connected to that. So. Just consciously envisioning people I work with being happy with me can help out quite a bit when I'm feeling overwhelmed. Minor trick. Seems silly! But just thinking of them being happy with me appears to help. (This was made easier a couple of weeks ago: I launched a couple of apps for clients who I also hung out with in Austin and they were visibly happy. As an aside: It can be tough for a developer to gauge client satisfaction. Tell your developer when they're doing a good job — otherwise, all they ever hear is BUG REPORT: YOU DONE BAD! I exaggerate a bit, but it can be tough to read whether people think I'm doing a good job or not.)

Like I said above, just reading other people's experiences online has been important. One trick someone pointed out on some forum or other: If they felt an attack coming on, they'd tell themselves that it might happen, but in ten or fifteen minutes it'll be over. Like it's a bit of aircraft turbulence and shortly you'll be back in smooth air. Which I've done. It just kind of breaks you out of the feeling of falling into the endless abyss to know that even if you do you start feeling strange, you'll be out of it soon enough. Takes the pressure off. Another technique someone mentioned is to just decide to let the panic attack happen. My therapist even once suggested that it might not be bad for me to actually faint from a panic attack just so I would know what that felt like and that it wasn't the end of the world. This trick is similar to that, but it actually kind of scary to do in practice. The idea, though, is that it's stressful just trying to hold yourself together when an attack starts to come on and that if you're just like "fuck it, I'm not going to die, let just get this over with" you neutralize the fear that causes the attack in the first place and you mitigate it. Another thing I've found myself doing lately is reacting to the feeling of an attack not by saying to myself, "oh, fuck fuck fuck fuck," but instead saying to myself, "Christ, not this horseshit again." Being dismissive of it seems to help. Anything that removes the feeling of fear.

Another thing I've been doing with myself: Aversion therapy. I think that's what it's called. But the basic idea is to dive straight into those things the GAD has made me irrationally afraid of. Driving. In October in Austin I could barely drive without causing myself to go into a state. I wasn't unsafe, but just sitting in a car made me feel enormously and irrationally afraid. Sort of a random thing, but probably connected to the feeling of being trapped or out of control. So I had some issues driving after I got to Austin a few weeks ago for SXSW. I want to stress, here: I never felt like I was unsafe driving or I wouldn't have done it. I just felt a big irrational fear. So I kept driving. Short drives in the neighborhood at first seemed daunting. But eventually I got myself up to driving thirty minutes out to the Salt Like and to the airport and by the time I left Austin last week I was quite enjoying driving again. I've always found it fun to drive around Austin, now I have that back. Aversion therapy.

Same with running and doing things in New York. When you're constantly worried that your heart might explode, running and exercise gets kind of hard to do. It's uncomfortable to try to run a few miles and have "I'm going to die any step now, I'm going to die any step now" racing through your brain. It's irrational. But that's how it works. But I've forced myself to keep running and playing soccer and am doing much better, now, as well. I've run more in March than I had in any month since July, when we were in Berlin and I was taking regular long-ass meandering runs all over the city.

Also, for Christmas Christin got me a book called When Panic Attacks by David D. Burns M.D. I've read about half of it, and it has some good advice and perspective. And, again, it's been helpful just to understand what I'm feeling and what's actually going on with me. But I tried to do some of the written exercises he recommended and, honestly, they didn't do that much for me. I'm probably getting the same effect (but better) just doing my own thinking on the issues and talking with the therapist. The only thing it's left me with so far is my new habit of asking myself "what's the worst that can happen?" when I get anxious. Just answering that in a realistic way can kind of take the edge off of a stressful situation, even something like flying where the answer might be "die in a fireball" I can follow it up with, "and what are the chances of that happening?" To which: Well, basically zero.

One thing I haven't done, yet: Medication. Well. I had a prescription for lorazepam that I was told to take to calm down if things got really bad. I took one every once in a while. And then had a super-stressful week working in New Orleans during which I popped a couple a day. But that's it. SO my doctor recently suggested I get on a light Prozac prescription for a while. I'm resistant to that idea at the moment for a few reasons: 1) I feel like I'm getting better on my own and that maybe it's more important to solve some of the underlying psychological issues through thought and therapy that it is to spackle over the problems with drugs. 2) While my GAD feels shitty, I've heard of people who've had much more debilitating forms. I think I've got a relatively light case. It's still a huge piece of shit, though, so when I hear about people who faint regularly from PAs or who have essentially become shut-ins because they can't bear even stepping outside — well, I can only imagine how completely crushing that might feel. But I feel like I'm managing mine — and I suspect that no one would even know I had an issue unless I mentioned it. My behavior hasn't become weird. (Well, it hasn't become any weirder, anyway.) 3) Related to the above, I just don't want to take pills if I don't need to. Simple as that.

I got a light prescription for Prozac, but I haven't filled it for the above reasons. Next week I'll see the doctor again and we'll go over where I'm at. I'm 100% in favor of taking input and advice from all angles, even if I ultimately decide to not do something.

And I think that's the biggest thing. I've found a lot of help just talking to people — friends, doctors, etc — about the situation. People I know who have gone through this have offered good advice and perspective. So much of controlling GAD and not getting panic attacks appears to simply be not letting yourself get wound up about it. (If only all disease were so easy to cure.) Hearing about other people who've gotten through the worst helps give perspective.

I'm sure I'm leaving out some major thoughts, here. This has been a topic I've thought about every day since my first panic attack back in August. It's consistently with me. So I've got a ton of thoughts on the matter. And this is maybe odd to say, but I think that overall it's been a strangely positive experience. The PAs and GAD suck, but I'm confident that I'll get it under control and maybe even get rid of it entirely. But it's shocked me into realizing my own mortality in a way that's got me making changes for the better. I'm off caffeine, for example. And I'm exercising more, now. And much better at understanding and managing life's stresses. So, y'know. Lemonade from lemons.

We missed a few weeks of class in the Fall due to Hurricane Sandy, so we're still wrapping up the semester this January. Going out there twice a week has been kind of intense, but ultimately I very much enjoy it and I think I'm beginning to see a little bit of light as far as understanding teaching techniques and having a good strategy for getting a group of most high school freshman and sophomores to create a functional, playable game together. Which is what I want to talk about, here.

Class Goals

The class that Kristana and I teach is structured like so: The class schedule has two parts of about equal length, a "game appreciation" segment and a "game design" segment. Kristana teaches "game appreciation," the first half. For the class we're currently teaching, this lasted from September through about November. I don't attend these classes, generally, because I'm usually just kind of overwhelmed with other work, but Kristana has the kids talk about games and prompts them to think a bit more deeply about their own experiences and opinions about games and game culture while also exposing them to how games function as art, as business, etc. I think of is as the "liberal arts" part of the class. The kids play games. They talk about games. They think about games. And hopefully reach some fresh insights and understanding.

My half of the class, which kicked off in October and will last until the end of January (due to Sandy), is about getting the kids to apply this new thinking about games and to get them to actually produce something real. One of my current students had a shocked moment earlier this semester when I started talking about the game they would be making: "Wait, what — we're actually going to have to make a game?!" Yes you're really going to have ot make a game. As far as these kids are concerned, video games are mystical creations forged from magic by wizards and elves in far-off lands. They haven't quite made the connection that game designers and game builders are, in fact, humans — many rather young humans — and that their craft is anything but magical. The demystification of this process is important.

But also, through this process, we get to touch on a ton of different topics. We talk about storytelling. Graphic design. Computer programming. Ethics. Interactive design. And, of course, straight-up game design. Game design encompasses so many other disciplines — I consider teaching game design an amazing way to sneak in all sorts of other content. The last class I taught at AUP, for example, we had a student with some learning disabilities who completely glommed on to the storytelling aspect of game design. He had a tough time working with the software to make game graphics or design levels, but he seemed to love sitting down and writing out page after page of scripts for the cut scenes in the game. (Sadly, we ran out of time and couldn't actually implement these — but he did get up in front of hundreds of people and read through his scripts, presenting his ideas.) And this is not to say that I think storytelling should be the focus, but it can certainly be a focus.

And part of this, as well, is that I've found that different students will have different things they're interested in. Some like graphics. Some want to make levels. Some want to write stories. And the format of coming together to produce a single project works great in that it allows students to play to their aptitudes and get some exposure to new stuff.

General Organizational Strategies

I have a web-based game-building tool I've created called Gametron 7000 (GT7K). But I've decided that putting the kids in front of the software tools too soon create problems. For one thing, they have no sense of direction and no idea what they're supposed to make, so they just kind of vaguely poke at it and then get distracted by YouTube or whatever. So my strategy right now is to spend several weeks simply brainstorming game ideas with the students and doing as much pen-on-paper design work as possible. Then during the last half of the class we actually get into GT7K and do the actual production.

Buy-In

Getting 15- and 16-year-olds to sit down, be quiet, please pay attention, please turn off the computer monitor and listen to me, turn off the monitor, please, right now, thank you, NO FOOD IN THE COMPUTER LAB, and you're going to have to leave if you keep being disruptive — it's a huge pain. Oh, lord. They'll come into class hyperactive to begin with and then sometimes totally jacked on shit like Rockstar Energy Drink (no joke) and often on cookies or candy or whatever. And they're kind of spazzy gamer kids to begin with, so they want to play with the computers and tend to bounce around with short attention spans.

So the first thing I try to do is get buy-in. I want them to feel invested in what we're doing. We're going to make a game. It will exist on the web for anyone to play — including your friends. So let's put some thought into it.

I have all of the students work together on a single game, so we start with forming a "game studio." I ask them to name some game studios they know (Valve seems to be the most well-known) and we talk in a basic way about how those companies are organized. I also introduce the concept of independent game studios, which they're less familiar with. Then we pick a name. The kids throw out ideas and we vote. And then no one's happy with the result, so I repeat the process the next class. We throw out names and vote. And wind up with a much better result since everyone's kind of had a few days to ponder the issue.

I've found that just having this name gels the class to a certain degree. It's an after-school class, so attendance varies. But my core game designer students seem to lock in to the process a bit after this step. I think it's the same sort of feeling of making a club that makes high school kids want to form rock bands or other little creative groupings. And because they named it, I think they feel a sense of ownership. Which is good.

Because my role is facilitator. I do a lot to smooth out the whole process, but major decisions I want them to make and own. And, to be frank, these kids know games. So they will make good decisions if there's a good process. A lot of it is simply having systems for surfacing ideas and letting them respond to one another, incorporating the good ideas and dropping the bad.

Sketching

Once we have our game studio set up, I have the kids do several rounds of game idea brainstorming over the course of several days. I get a stack of paper and some pens and I instruct them to quietly draw out ideas for any kind of game they might be interested in making. What does it look like? Is there a story? What's the main game mechanic? Is it top-down? Side-scrolling? Platformer? Something else entirely? (I explain that GT7K is fairly basic, allowing mostly for 2D early Nintendo Entertainment System-era types of games: think Zelda, Mario, Metroid, etc. Which is actually fine by them, since retro-ish stuff like Super Meat Boy and Minecraft seem to be quite the thing with the kids these days.)

They hate this. Sitting down with pens and paper. At least to start. Getting the kids to stop talking, focus and actually think is a pain-in-the-ass. Sucks, but true. This current group at McKee has some issues with focus, so the first half of any brainstorming session involves a fair amount of scolding. Which I'm getting quite good at. I'll even yell at the little monsters, on occasion, which I suspect most people who know me will have trouble specifically envisioning. (Maybe not.) I've found that the surest way to command the room is to be the loudest thing in it, and thankfully I'm a big dude with a big voice when I feel like using it...

They will, though, eventually break down a bit, quiet themselves, and brainstorm. The bitching and whining about not having any ideas will give way to scribbling down one idea, and then the floodgates will open for some of the students. A few in this current class seem to willfully shut themselves off a bit, taking a sort of "I'm cooler/smarter than you, so this is kind of below me" attitude, and a few others just might be too shy or scared or whatever and can't relax and think. But many of the kids will suddenly find themselves having a lot of fun thinking about game ideas and seem like they'll do it all day and into the night if I didn't eventually have to get home myself. Part of my challenge is shielding these students who are engaged from the ones who want to distract them.

After a few days of this, though, we do wind up with a stack of game ideas. Some bad. Many quite good. These kids have mostly played a ton of games, so they have fairly good intuition about these things.

I have each student explain each of their game ideas to the group. We talk about them. And then we vote. And then no one's happy with the result, so I repeat the process the next class. We talk about their game ideas. And then we vote. And the two times I've done this process, we reach consensus pretty darn quickly. Both times all of the kids have eventually voted for and been most excited by one idea, so that's what we've rolled with.

For the record, the current class settled on a top-down game of underground labyrinths. The player plays a character with a flaming head that's the only light source in the game, leaving room for plenty of surprise moments and scary puzzles. The more health the player has, the brighter the flame and the more you can see. The less health, the less bright. So you play this flaming-head-guy character and have to navigate through a series of mysterious labyrinths. It's a legitimately good idea!

Establishing Rapport

Okay. So I've done more yelling at teenagers the past few months than ever before, like I said. It's a brave, new world. An opening up of vistas. I hope to eventually move on to yelling at young children and old people. Then waiters who don't bring out the water promptly enough and compound the problem by bringing tap water when I clearly asked for sparkling, and where is your manager, anyway? No tip. Etc.

So. Learning to communicate with these buggers — the students — is obviously very important. I have a bit of a leg-up, I think, because I'm not exactly a teacher in the same way their other teachers are, and (despite the scolding) I try not to present myself as an authority figure. "I do this kind of stuff in the real world. People pay me (fairly well) to do it. If you want, I would love to help you go through this process and learn a bit about how it works. If you're not interested, I don't care — but you've got the leave the room so the rest of us can work." And I'm honest about that: They can leave. I will try to get shy kids involved, but I won't force anyone to participate.

But these are mostly boys on the nerdier end of the spectrum and I do think they look up to me and see me as one of them. Christin hates my Valve video game t-shirts, but wearing them to class seems to help. We have normal conversations. We talk about what games we've been playing. Even when bitching at them, I try to always maintain the tone of "hey, we're all working together, here — let's keep it together so we have something cool to show."

And it does seem to work. I think I have a good rapport with most of them. A couple come in and just kind of tune out and won't do anything I ask — those I essentially ignore. Again, if they're not interested in participating, then they get left out of the club. Sorry. (I do feel like I'm aware of distinguishing shyness from disinterest, and I will go out of my way to figure out how to get shy kids to open up.)

Anyway, I feel like this has been working. The kids seem excited to be there, for the most part, and I do feel like they're fairly comfortable around me, for the most part.

Fleshing Out the Game

After we've got a game idea that we want (the flaming-head-guy-labyrinth game), we repeat the sit-down-with-pen-and-paper sketching process, but instead of drawing whole new game ideas, I have the kids draw screenshots from the game we've picked. I pose it like so: Imagine you're reading reviews of this game after it's been made. What do the screenshots they use from the game look like? The idea is to get them to visualize specifically what the game will be like to play, and in doing this brainstorm all of the various elements of the game. What might the labyrinthine mazes look like? What does the player look like? Are there bad guys? Obstacles? What are they? What do they look like? How to do they move? What do they do? We do this for a few class sessions and I try to create a list of all of the ideas for what might be in this game.

I also take this opportunity to talk about theme and story in the game. When pondering what kinds of bad guys might inhabit their game, for example, it could be helpful to think of what the story could be. Is the main character rescuing someone? Defeating someone or something? Collecting things? Why? To what end? Or: Are there any fun ways to play with the theme? On student in our class, for example, started pondering the guy with a flame for a head — and it dawned on him: Why not make all of the bad guys out of water? And suddenly there's a sort of light-weight game story behind the mechanics of the game. Fire guy versus the water people. Or whatever.

This stuff is tough, but I think it's really satisfying. These details are what turns some random idea into something that feels like it could be a real game. And, to be honest, we get to talk about the terrible blandness and repetition in many game stories and scenarios. Feeling like they've got an idea that might actually be better than many of the game ideas they've experienced is a big deal.

Production: Creating Assets

So now we have a game, a story/theme, some ideas for levels and a sense of what else might be in the game. Now we have to make it. This is where I'm currently at with my class. We're making assets.

GT7K is nice because it makes it incredibly easy to reuse any assets already in the system, so I can start them out with a basic game framework and it's very easy for me to have the kids make accounts and then show them how to make a level and test it out.

But I try to add some structure, because we're on a timeline and we have to ship a game at the end of the class, so after they're a bit familiar with the tools I sit them down again and try to break things down a bit.

Last week, we started with visual assets. What kind of art do we need? A player graphic. Some walls. Bad guys. Coins. Doors. Etc. We listed some things and then each student got to pick one and make it. (For the record, this Flash-based pixel art tool called Piq proved a huge hit — they really enjoyed using it, for the most part. Some kids also used the iPad, though the aesthetic is quite different.) So over the course of our couple of hours, they make their graphics. And this is tough — they're not used to creating graphics that will fit into a game, so we have to talk about it. And they've been kind of tentative, for the most part. But I feel like simply getting them to do anything and then seeing that thing actually in a game moving around will be significant.

I've been trying to communicate my philosophy that the first time you do something creative, it will suck. You'll be tempted to compare your first try with some profession game designer's twentieth try — and that's an unfair comparison. Your game isn't going to be perfect. Your art is going to be kind of weird. Your levels might not be that fun. But, y'know what: Everyone's first game sucks. But after you're done, you'll be better at making games. And maybe your second game will be awesome. Or your third. Keep trying and eventually it'll start to click. That's how art works.

So part of this process is simply getting them to produce anything that I can then take and glue together into a semi-cohesive game.

We'll do this process with levels this coming week. It'll be more of the same thing. They'll be sort of confused and I'll try to get them to push through and create something that I can stitch together for them.

Gluing it All Together

Finally, like I said, I will take everything they've created and bring together their game. There's a lot of technical stuff which they can't really do on their own, and I've decided that I'd rather them spend their time being creative than spend their time learning to do technical stuff.

My thinking: If they're inspired to create games, they will eventually have to figure out how to use computers and progra on some level. So get them excited about designing games, they'll have to pick up the computer skills somehow. And I think in many ways creative thinking skills trump technical skills. And I'm someone who codes most of the day — I love technical stuff. It's obviously important. But I also know how it can affect creative thought in a negative way. It's something I battle against almost daily.

So, we haven't reached this point with my current class, but if all goes well I'll glue together their game, built from all of their ideas, and we'll do some play-testing and let other students take a look. We'll make some tweaks, and then launch! I'll put it up online for the world to see and for them to be proud of.

The Princess is in Another Castle

One more thing.

I've left this subject towards the end because I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, but — yes — my class at AUP was all guys and my class at McKee is mostly guys with one or two girls coming by occasionally. I don't know what to do about this. I try my best to engage and include girls when they do show up, and I feel I've had some success, but it's tough in the context of the class because they don't attend regularly enough to really be up-to-speed with what we're doing. There's a group of four or five boys who really drive the class — which I think is great. They get excited and they want to participate, making it a little tougher for any students who doesn't regularly appear. The lack of gender diversity, though — I am not yet ready to call it a problem, exactly, but it's something I want to know more about. If girls aren't interested in this particular game class and are happy doing something else, well, I'd rather not have a bunch of uninterested people lingering around, male or female. If girls want to be there but aren't showing up because they're feeling intimidated or out-of-place or like they don't want to deal with noisy, stinky boys... That's a bigger problem. But I still don't know the solution. If anyone has better thoughts on this, please advise.

Another quick diversity observation: Almost all of my students in both classes have been minorities. I think we've had just one caucasian student attend semi-regularly in the current class. Just interesting to note.

Onward

So that's my thinking at this point. Learning how to teach game design is an ongoing process for me, my techniques and opinions may change wildly each time I do this. But I figured it'd be useful to document my thinking right now. Hopefully it'll be useful to someone else. And I do think it'll be very interesting to look back on this and reflect upon how my attitudes have changed over time.

We trimmed the tree this evening — Christin, the cat, and I. Which put a punctuation mark on the end of the Thanksgiving season 2012.

It's the first Thanksgiving I've actually spent in New York since I moved here. Every other year I've always taken the bus out to my grandmother's place in Northampton, PA to keep her company. We would usually hang out, chat about things (politics seems to be a favorite), and crash the neighbor's Thanksgiving feast. A good time, but also a little isolating. Christin had her family and other folks over for Thanksgiving several years ago, but I felt obligated to be in Pennsylvania, so I had to miss the feast (although I did get to witness the aftermath, coming back that Friday).

We've got this new place, though, now. It's a bit more comfortable. Has a bit more space. So Christin and I are, for the first time, actually fairly excited to stick around here for the holidays for the first time. (I also go out to Pennsylvania every year for Christmas.) The summer and fall have also just been a busy mess for us. On top of all of the effort we put into finding and moving into the new place, we also had the European travels, cat-health-related chaos, my weird little health scare — and then just the usual tough work schedules, teaching, etc. The idea of adding a bunch of travel into the mix kind of makes me want to pull my hair out at the moment. Or, at least, the idea of adding a bunch of travel on the same days everyone else in the country has travel plans. So. We're sticking here.

But. I can't leave Grandma to the wolves, so Christin and I took a trip out there last weekend. Now, my Grandmother is a sweet old woman. I've written about her before on the blog. She's 95. Pennsylvanian German. Spent her career teaching kindergarten. And just comes out of a very different world than we're used to today. She's always lived in Northampton, a tiny town in the hills just outside of Allentown. But which also happens to be a stone's throw from New York, Philly, and to a lesser extent Washington, DC. Both isolated and a little off-the-map, but also surprisingly well connected to the world. Isolated enough that it's just a little tough finding time to make the two-hour bus trek out there, especially for Christin, who is just as busy as I am but doesn't have quite the direct family connection. Unless. There's a good reason.

So we've moved into this new apartment. It's well larger than the old place. So we're on a bit of a furniture quest. And we're also feeling a little more financially together, so we're getting less and less interested in cheap options like Ikea. We'd like stuff we can keep.

So. This fact collided quite conveniently with the fact that my Grandmother is constantly pushing me to take whatever I want from her home if I need it. Furniture, housewares, art, food, etc. I'm the only child of my Grandmother's only child, so there's no competition and no one to really ask except my Mom, who has already taken all she needs for both homes my folks live in (Austin, TX and Elliston, NL). The main issue: Grandma's stuff doesn't really match what we're after as far as furniture. It's kind of mostly from the 70s and 80s, stuff that you'd kind of typically think of older people during that tie owning. A little rustic. Oddly-colored. Weird patterns. Christin's been kind of moving towards a mid-century modern aesthetic, over here, anyway. And it's a little off-putting for *me* to think of dismantling anything in this home. For one thing, so much in my Grandmother's house has just Always Been Like That as far as I'm concerned. Every corner of the place has memories packed into it from when I was five, thirteen, nineteen, twenty-three, thirty, etc. The idea of making any major changes is kind of shocking, like I might accidentally shatter the structure upon which these memories have been hung.

But. It turns out that Grandmother did finally have something of interest to Christin. My Grandfather and her had a kind of artists' studio in their basement. Art runs deep in the family and my Grandfather taught high school art for many decades and both of my Grandparents ran a pottery business, as well, in the late 40s and 50s. (I don't know the full story on this.) So there's family art all over the place. And this basement area was the workshop. So unlike the rest of the house — very traditional, old-fashioned, etc — the basement kind of feels like some hip little zone from the 50s. Functionalist, mid-century modern furniture (including several homemade pieces). Easels. Desks. Art supplies and art books everywhere. Bright fluorescent lighting that seemed so stark and cool when I was younger. An old TV (at least, there always was back in the day — I think it's gone, now). Just one of those places where paint has already kind of been lightly splattered on everything, so you feel comfortable being there, potentially making a mess of your own. Some of my very strong memories of being at the home with my Grandparents come from being down there — I used to love it as a kid exactly because of this kind of out-of-the-way clubhouse feel. I could go down and draw with my markers or paint or whatever and just do my thing. Again, I'm an only child, so that kind of semi-isolated play space where I can just explore alone is very important to my psyche. (Still is.) And that's also where my Grandfather would on occasion give me art lessons. I remember vividly doing watercolors with him when I was quite young and in my early teens doing some sketching exercising and finally sort of "graduating" up to oil paints. (It still pains me a bit that I put up one oil painting I did down there — a kind of boxy, geometric, abstract face-thing that I remember quite liking — that I hung this painting on the wall at my undergrad co-op, the House of Commons, and just simply forgot to retrieve it during the tumult of graduating and moving out. Maybe someone grabbed it and it's still hanging somewhere that know one knows where it came from. Maybe it wound up in the trash. But it's one of those things where, wow, one time starts chugging along and people start passing along you just wish you still had. Can't keep all things, though, and it's the memory more than the object itself that's important, I suppose.) Anyway: Lots of memories packed down there. The first computer I owned, a Colecovision ADAM, also wound up down there when I graduated up to a Mac Classic sometime during junior high school. I used to spend a considerable amount of time clickety-clacking away at the old thing until it finally gave up the ghost sometime after I entered undergad.

Anyway. Let's rewind back to "mid-century modern furniture." When Christin heard about this stuff from my mom, suddenly we had a very good reason to rent a U-Haul and go spend the weekend with Grandma. We love Grandma, but the fact of the matter is, killing two birds with one stone is always preferable to killing just one bird with one stone — especially if one of those birds is shaped like helping furnish the new apartment and the other bird has the turnkey-like shape of visiting Grandma around Thanksgiving. So, yes. U-Haul rented. Weekend with Grandma. And, in the end, two small 50s era couches are now sitting beside me as I type this (right around the Christmas tree that we installed yesterday and trimmed today). How to describe them? Angular. Two seats wide (love-seats, although I'm hesitant to call them that because they're much more functional like they wouldn't feel out of place in the offices of Stering Cooper). Thin frame, painted black. Thinnish square cushions that my Grandmother sewed simple red plaid fabric over sometime in the 70s (which Christin hates but other people, including myself, seem kind of like). Nice. A little flimsy — I'm staying off of them until we have a chance to secure them and make sure they're strong — but basically in good shape. The cat loves them.

Christin doesn't visit Pennsylvania with me very often, so Grandma also enjoys stocking her up on family lore and just Tales of the Pennsylvania Dutch while we're out there. It's kind of funny: I feel I've heard these stories so often that they're background noise to me, almost. To the piont where I actually know the stories much less well than I *think* I do, simply because I kind of tune them out a little bit or we just don't talk about them at all anymore, they're such old news. So it's nice to have Christin there to hear things for the first time.

This visit we got the art history of the family. Which, like I said, is something I'm kind of loosely aware of but the information's kind of stale in my mind. Last Saturday evening Chrstin and I got tour of my Grandmother's art archives. Lots of paintings in the basement. Many by my Grandfather (including a very large mosiac of a small town city block which, as I understand it, had been hanging at the local high school for decades with the agreement that upon my Grandfather's death it would be returned to the family), but also quite a few nice oilpaintings of landscapes by my Grandmother than were very accomplished. It was a nice reminder that this woman, who has been Very Old for most of the time I've known her — and the entirety of the time I've known her while I've been an adult, that this woman was my age at one point. Had a career. A talent with art and a desire to use that talent. It's interesting to be reminded of those echos in myself, especially from people who didn't directly raise me (although I did see them an awful lot — see above: Only child of an only child). Christin were also struck by a couple of the reverse-paintings my Grandfather had done (most of their art dates from the 50s and 60s). I'm not exactly sure of the process, but as I understand it, one paints the "reverse" of a black-and-white image with wax or something and then paints over the entire canvas with black paint. Then, one peels away the wax and the black paint only remains where there hadn't been any way. The result is kind of a woodcut print-like feel, but not quite as rough and angular — more flowing and organic like a painting. Anyway — we liked these and we asked if we could take these for the apartment and we did.

A quick aside about my Grandfather's art style. And maybe this is an example of that part of Pennsylvania both feeling out-of-the-way and globally connected. Okay. So my information is wildly incomplete, but my understanding is that my Grandfather holds a BA and Master's in art. First person in his family to attend college. But well-studied. In 2003 when I went to Berlin and stayed with Brenna, we wound up going to an exhibition about "Die Br�cke," an art movement in just-barely-pre-WWI Germany. And my first though was, Holy shit — this stuff looks like the style of art my Grandfather made. Bold colors. Impressionistic, but on the angular and abstract side of the spectrum. Especially the landscapes (I don't think my Grandfather did that many paintings of people, if I recall). My Grandfather's stuff wasn't exactly like that movement. It tended to be much less visually shrill to my eyes and also, like I said, less interested in people. And, ultimately, he worked in all sorts of different styles.

Now, I have no idea if there's an actual connection or what. But. He was born in 1913. So studied in college around the early-mid 30s. Just enough time for movements like that to have grown and left Germany and made their way to exibitions in the States (in nearby New York, for example). I don't know if he had any awareness of that movement, but I think it's the first time I'd considered his works — which always seemed old and distant to my child's eyes — as something done related to an at-the-time contemporary movement, something new that he was seeing that he wanted to emulate. His works don't resemble much at all the much more folksy PA Dutch works that my great-grandmother and *her* mother did that still exist in our various family homes. Those tend to be needlepoint scenes of farms and covered bridges and quilts. But they got informed from somewhere. And it's interesting to think of him getting these signals from these contemporary art scenes in Europe and trying to participate in what he saw. A little hard for me to articulate, here, but that style of painting (or, more broadly, "visual communication") was quite cutting-edge and boundary-busting at the time, I imagine. And it's maybe a little hard for people of my generation to get particularly excited about paint on canvas when we live in a world of art and creativity that's being violently pushed along by several related technological revolutions sort of happening at once. But that feeling of frission he felt might not've been dissimilar to how I felt getting into electronic music and experimental stuff in high school and college and feeling like it connected me to some bigger cultural movement that was afoot. Anyway, this is all hypothetical. Sadly, my Grandfather died about ten years ago — to early for me to have had these sorts of reflections.

Anyway. This is getting long.

My Grandmother also showed us her collection of pottery pieces from when she and her husband ran their pottery business (late 40s, 50s) — including a few plates with scribbly designs done by my four(-ish) year old mother. She also took Christin through some of the PA Dutch symbology on the plates. The PA Dutch make plates for births and marriages, and there are things like the three droplets (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), the wavy line ("life has its ups-and-downs"), and distelfink (a stylized finch representing happiness), etc. I like hearing about the Pennsylvania Dutch stuff, simply because I don't otherwise feel particularly culturally interesting, so it's kind of neat to have this connection to an odd little American sub-culture. (My Grandmother's family has been living right in that area of Pennsylvania for something on the order of 400 years — the old family home is apparently on the National Register of Historic Places.) We took no pottery. I wanted to let my Mom take a look at everything first, and I felt too nervous about the chances of that stuff breaking.

Finally, quilts. I'll be fast, here. Grandma took us through the quilt collection — all made by the family. Christin picked out a nice one made by my great-great-grandmother in what we're ballparking to be the 1870s. It's a traditional starburst pattern, done with small patterned pieces of cloth mostly of the pale yellow, orange, and blue colors. And, to my shock and amazement, the thing looks like it could be brand new. Very well-preserved.

I'm running out of steam, here. It's been a long week and it's about 1am. I could keep babbling on and on endlessly with various thoughts about this and that.

I have a pre-New Year's resolution to blog weekly. We'll see how that goes.

Christin and I took a walk across the Williamburg Bridge into a darkened Lower East Side last night. Just out of curiosity about what post-Sandy blackout Manhattan looked like. We didn't spend too much time down there — turns out a powerless Lower East Side is actually kind of a dead Lower East Side. At least the day after Halloween. We wandered for a bit and then I had a beer at some candle-lit bar with the Pulp Fiction soundtrack playing on an old battery-power jambox. But! I got a few interesting pix with the old Canon DSLR. Turns out that antique still works.

The wavy lines in these are people walking with flashlights. I used 30 second exposures, for the most part, so anyone walking by got kind of lost — unless they had some kind of light. The light in the picture right above came from a guy jogging with a little penlight strapped to his head.

The sign still had a warning from during the hurricane, which I assumed just stuck once the power went out.

(If you are a teacher, this is where you make a face at the screen and say "no shit.")

Quickly, before I begin: My high school students know how to use Google. And a few know the quiet art of Googling someone's name to figure out more about them. So! Some of them are at least cursorily aware of this blog — some might even read this. In which case: Hello, there, young scholar. Mr. Knowles has a potty mouth. (They don't call me "Mr. Knowles." They also don't really call me "Josh." They prefer "Hey.")

I do hope some students check this out, actually. One of the most eye-opening parts of teaching, so far, has simply been seeing the classroom from the other side of the desk. Being a student is kind of a freaky experience — you're young, so your baseline is you sitting there stewing in fresh hormones. And then you're dumped into the deep end of topics that you might not give a particular shit about — but if you don't excel at them, well, then Your Future is in jeopardy. And you are judged. By teachers. By peers. By coaches. By parents. For me, at least, I had almost no headspace left over whatsoever to ponder what the teaching experience might be like. If I had, it probably would've relaxed me a bit. Which probably would've made me looser and more communicative in class. Less intimidated. Maybe one side-effect of this new communication culture in which we live is that current students can get a touch of insight into what's going on in their teachers' minds and outside lives. (At least those teachers who blog.) Which is humanizing. And good. (As long as the teacher isn't into stuff like flashing people on the subway or dismembering squirrels.)

Some of that constricted headspace is necessary. School is about molding brains. So sometimes you just have to sit someone down and lay out the facts for them and make sure they remember what you said. But. High schools need significantly more Montessori-style and collaboration-focused teaching. Especially since if you get someone excited about the possibilities of a Thing, then they'll naturally start asking questions about what that Thing is and how it works. And generating excitement is something that happens via play and exploration. And open conversation.

Which is kind of the over-arching goal of the game design class I'm co-teaching over at Bushwick High in Brooklyn. I'm trying to stoke their interest in making games (which isn't terribly hard) and convert it into playful exploration with game making tools. And then use that to stoke their interest in other related topics.

I am not achieving that goal, currently. By the way. Currently things are a bit of a mess.

Which is why I say teaching is hard.

I have been given the chance to have an unusual perspective on teaching. Last year I taught, for the first time, a high school class, an undergraduate class, and a graduate course. It's neat to be able to compare and contract students at these different levels. And there's no question: High school is the most challenging.

Part of that difficulty is simply that it's very, very hard to judge results — at least in a situation like mine where I'm trying to facilitate creativity (I can't just give 'em exams at the end). I try to communicate and, more importantly, I try to impart bigger perspectives and simply get them excited about something. And the students will superficially let you know what they think — they will, for example, drift off to YouTube the moment they get the littlest bit bored. But it's tough to know what's working at what's not: What sticks in their head in such a way that they ponder it on their walk home after school? That's extremely difficult for me to see. And, to put it in programmer terms, it makes it very difficult to optimize and debug my teaching.

Then there's this second issue. The easy part of teaching game design is getting kids interested. Computer games (anything played using a device with a microchip) have such a tight grip on a certain demographic. It's possibly the only subject these kids will have in high school where other teachers and parents will be concerned that they're spending too much time with the material outside of class. And, possibly, one of the few cases where a strong argument could be made that the students have a deeper relationship with the material than the teacher does. (At least when it comes to certain games.)

The hard part is kind of everything else that comes after that.

For example. Let me start with a question:

What can you use game design to teach? What disciplines are contained within or overlap game design?

• Computer programming. Obviously. (And, yes, "game design" encompasses more than just computer game or video game design — but that's the format we're dealing with in class.)

• Technology platforms.

• Math. Logic.

• Visual design.

• Sound design.

• User interface design. (Rescue the princess? How does a player even know that's the goal? What does the "A" button do? Why did I die when I touched that?(

• Storytelling.

• Social media.

• Cultural context and situation.

• Potentially all sorts of business stuff: Marketing. Sales. Money.

• And then whatever the content of the game itself is about.

If you're into games, none of this is new. (And I'm leaving out "game design" because, well, no shit.) But it creates a meta-design issue.

I'm trying to teach them how to make games themselves. Computer games. And when I taught this class last Summer I went through several tools before settling on YoYoGames' GameMaker software. Which was pretty good. Except that all of our time was spent on the first element above: Computer programming. It took an entire two hour class to just get a sprite on the screen that they could move with the arrow keys. For a short class, that's just way too long. Especially when they're making 2D sprite-based games. They all just wound up making erratic variations of bullet hell shooters: Top-down games where you use the arrow keys to move a sprite around and fire a blazing torrent of bullets every which way in order to kill some baddies.

We had zero opportunity to even begin to explore any of these other topics. And — speaking as someone who codes all day and loves it — I think the computer programming part is the necessary but otherwise least important piece of the game design puzzle. Storytelling. Visual design. Hell, just the general ability to have a vision of a feeling or effect you want to have on your players. "I want to scare them." "I want them to be so happy they can't contain themselves." "I want them to learn about how viruses mutate." "I want a two-player game that causes people to fall in love." That's the meat of any creative art. "I want several thousand lines of Objective C code sitting on my hard drive" — ugh, no.

And we were additionally hamstrung by the fact that GameMaker lives on the computer hard drives, along with all their files. So they couldn't work from home. And if they used a different machine the next week, they had to start over. And — critically — they had no way to be proud of the game at the end. No way to share. No way to see other people play it (beyond the few of us in class).

So I decided to be a hubristic coder and just develop my own game-making platform. Which — I don't know. I've been bothering everybody about this thing, so I feel weird getting into it, here. But let's go for it so I can do some thinking about what it is and where it needs to go. Because, as currently conceived, it is broken. But there is a spark of a core idea inside of it which is solid. It's heart is in the right place. I think.

Oh: GT7K. Gametron 7000. That's the name. Background: I made a simple level-editor tool as a project while at ITP. It let you make levels on the web and then play them on your mobile phone. (J2ME, bitches. 2006.) There's very little overlap, otherwise, between these projects. But I kind of like the name, so I reused it.

(And you're welcomed to sign up for a GT7K invite, but I'm not opening up the actual tool to everyone. It's very undercooked at the moment.)

So. GT7K.

The whole idea behind GT7K is that I want to get the students from zero to simple game in five minutes. You sign in. I explain how it works. Click, click, click. Simple game. What took four weeks using GameMaker I want to compress into five minutes. Impossible, you say. But, no! Everything in GT7K is social. So if you want a space invaders game, you go find one that's already been made that's close to what you want. Copy it. Customize. Bam. You have a game.

And the thinking, here, isn't that I want the students to make 400 shitty space invader clones per hour. The thinking is that I want to compress the computer programming part of the equation down so that after that five minutes they're thinking of character design, level design, storytelling, etc. The other stuff. If they enjoy what they're doing, they'll dig into the coding side of things on their own. That's how it works, right? Isn't that how half of us (at least) learned to code in the first place? "That's really cool! How do I do that? How do I change that? How do I do more than that?" If I can get the code out of the way so they can explore the other creative elements in game design, maybe they'll unlock a deeper interest and appreciation and then they can go back and get excited by how the code works. (Or discover they love making graphics. Or playing with sound. Or writing stories. Coding is not the only thing people who make games do.)

One student exemplified this. Second class, I think. This semester (maybe a month ago). My approach to introducing my high school students to GT7K was simply to explain the overall philosophy of the app — what the different sorts of "objects" in the game were, how to edit them, etc — and then just let them explore. I'd answer any questions as they came up. By the second class, one student had already copied a simple platformer I made and had altered it to create a simple story. My platformer was mostly just a game engine test — making sure the sprites moved properly and that collisions worked and such. Not even a game. But he took it and took the random graphics I'd tossed into it (a girl character, a spaceship, some space invaders-like creatures), and created a story: You're the girl. You're on a planet. You have to fight through the aliens (jumping and shooting) to get to your spaceship so you can leave and get home. (Touching the spaceship ended the game with a "you win" message.)

This was very, very simple, obviously. Certainly the student who created it didn't melt any brain cells doing it. But. It was exactly what I was hoping to see. He shortcut past most of the programming stuff and got straight to the point where he could think about telling a story.

And GT7K is all online, so that game is accessible on any computer on the planet without having to upload it or publish it or anything. (Again, I'm not going to link to it right now because all of GT7K is under wraps until I'm comfortable opening it up.) And he could work on it from home. Etc.

And! If another student finds it inspiring, they can make a copy for themselves and change it up however they want. Click, click, click. New game. New ideas.

Hopefully I am — in my babbling way — communicating my overall goals with GT7K. (I've had a few beers — can you tell?)

And, so.

Now the bad news:

This is a huge design challenge. Oh, lord. Currently, like I said, GT7K has a glimmer of something good flickering at its core, but creating tools that feel engaging, inviting, fun, understandable, satisfying... Holy shit. It's not really any of those things at the moment. At least not as much I want it to be. And finding that point of balance between flexibility and ease-of-use is very hard. These kids with no programming skills need to be able to get their hands dirty with it and have success. But how do I balance between "understandable but restrictive" and "complicated but flexible?" I don't know where that point it. It's quite possible I'm in completely over my head.

(And, although my current audience is high school kids — how do I build this thing with an eye on the general population? I could see it being of interest to all sorts of people.)

This is where it gets all confusing and murky to me. Firstly, I'm not some epic game designer myself. The universe of game design is so rich and dynamic at the moment, every time I look there's some fascinating new game or some interesting new tool for game making. Just last week, for example, Valve released their Portal 2 level editor called "Perpetual Testing Initiative." I haven't played with it yet, but wow. It looks amazing. And, of course, projects like GameStar Mechanic. Which, when it comes to thinking about the educational use of game-making platforms, I've put about 1/10th of 1% of the thought and creativity into it that those folks have. So I'm trying to navigate this narrow space where I'm allowing myself to build something inferior to other products in many ways just so I can learn and potentially have a revelation or two that will let it evolve in a new and distinctive direction.

Six months in, I'm just getting the first tastes of what those things might be. Though, the ideas aren't well-formed enough to really write about here, except to say that restrictive tools can actually lead to creative power — that's nothing new — so I'm beginning to hone in on how to turn the necessarily restrictive nature of a project like this into a feature, not a bug.

Well, and there's a vary obvious differentiator, which has been a part of the idea from the start: All objects within GT7K are completely open and shareable between users. See something you like? Copy it and use it. As far as I know, I haven't seen anything quite as molecularly shareable like this. It's funny. That part of GT7K has been so baked in from day one that I kind of lose sight of it.

Anyway. That's a couple thousand words, so let's wrap up. Hopefully I've given a little insight into my thinking on teaching and game design. Both teaching and the attempt at creating this game design tool have been mind-expanding. (Hopefully for the students, as well!)

If you are interested in GT7K, please sign up so I have your e-mail address. The opening-up process will be slow, but I would love to get feedback from everyone I can. I'm not a spammer and I won't do anything weird. I'll probably just get a little over-excited if I think I'm stumbled upon something compelling.

Thanks for reading!

I spend my Thanksgivings out in Pennsylvania with my 94-year-old grandmother (my mom's mom, the PA Dutch former kindergarten teacher). For various reasons, including that I have a tiny extended family none of whom live particularly close to one another, it's usually just her and I for this particular holiday. My parents stick in Texas. We usually do the obligatory "Happy Thanksgiving" call with them, which is fine.

This year I decided to try something a bit different. I had my laptop handy (natch), and since my parents had recently discovered the brave new world of video calling with Skype, I figured I'd see what happened when I cranked up Skype and stuck my grandmother in front of it to talk with the family.

My grandmother is, I should note, mostly deaf. And blind to a certain degree. Speaking with her is a relatively slow and deliberate process of picking simple sentences and enunciating them clearly a couple times until she gets what you're saying. The blindness I'm not as clear about, but she claims that faces are mostly blurry — although she apparently reads lips to a certain degree to help with the hearing issue. And she's hit and miss being able to see what's happening when she watches TV. (Hits: Horse racing and sports when the teams are wearing distinctive enough colors. Misses: Anything with text on the screen or that changes too quickly, as far as I can tell — although she has a standard-def TV set which can't possibly be helping.)

Anyway: Skype was a hit. She claimed to be able to see my parents quite clearly on my 15" MacBook Pro screen and I could tell she had a very easy time hearing them — a definite surprise considering the relatively weak quality of the laptop's speakers. But they held their conversation and then did the sort of usual first time Skype user tricks of aiming the laptop camera at different things and showing off the cat.

Now. For me — and for you — this is nothing new. In fact, it's easy to slip into a weird sort of elitist "oh, crap — the family found Skype" thing, as if (as with e-mail and online chat) this going to lead to some increased level of annoyance as the noobs start using these things all wrong. And Skype itself as both a (former) company and as a software service has all this baggage attached to it, and blah blah blah.

But grandmother's mind was blown.

Which expressed itself in a couple of ways:

1) The degree of connection it gave her with my parents amazed her. She was right there. They were right here. She could see their house. My mom could comment on her turkey sweater. Grandma even said at one point, "You could just put a bunch of these around the table to have everyone over for dinner." This sounds simplistic, but grandma does not do much brainstorming about technological innovations in her day-to-day. And she had a little melancholic emotional moment when we shut down the chat, like she had been dropped back into the real world where the family was actually a couple thousand miles away in Texas and not just sitting across the table.

2) After the Skype call she asked me all about what just happened. Again: Grandma decided a while back that she Just Doesn't Understand Computers, so this was a rather rare occurrence, having to get into explaining how, exactly, we just did this rather futuristic thing on her dining room table. I did my best, but we're talking about someone with an extremely low level of technological literacy.

She clearly wanted something like this, so one question was: "How much does a device like this cost?" "Well, it's a piece of software that runs on my computer. This is the same computer I use for work and other stuff." Confusion. She doesn't seem to understand the distinction between a computer as a piece of hardware and application software that runs on the computer. She thinks in terms of unified devices. Like the telephone, TV set, or dishwasher. "So the software and that call were free," I continued. Again, confusion. "And do the neighbors use something like this?" "Yeah, probably." Anyway: This sort of conversation continued.

It's nice to occasionally be reminded that we're living in a bizarre future, and that it's pretty cool. I do things regularly that feel so pedestrian — and yet would shock someone just ten or twenty years ago. Remember those AT&T "You Will" ads from the mid-90s? Go back and watch them. Video calls? On-demand movies? Checking e-mail on the beach? Sci-fi concepts. Now imagine you were born before radio became a thing.

(As a quick aside: I have a feeling that text messages seem like some kind of psychic connection from my grandmother's vantage. Like, we're taking a walk and I blurt out, "Oh, Christin's having burgers with her dad in Florida." But she didn't see me check my phone or anything (remember, hard of sight). I don't know exactly how she envisions I got that transmitted nugget of info, but (to wear out a term) let's go with "magic.")

(Another quick aside: I suspect my mom will get around to reading this post to her. It's happened before. Surely grandma has no concept of a "blog," as she doesn't use the web. So he may not realize that damned near anyone on this planet can read what I write here instantly, just a second after I publish it. Obvious to you and I. But not necessarily to her. And quite amazing, again, once you kind of step back and appreciate the technology. Even though Twitter was totally down for, like, fifteen minutes the other day and it totally sucked why can't they get their act together the internet is so fucking stupid.)

So, yeah. Not sure how much grandma actually understood about how the tech worked. But clearly the call was a huge success, so I started considering how to get grandma access to Skype more regularly. My thought: Get grandma an iMac with Apple Remote Desktop. Set it up. She literally never has to touch the thing — I just get into her computer remotely and bring up Skype. We may instead use an old laptop, which she'd have to at least touch to open the lid, but would otherwise work the same. We're considering getting her a new flat-screen TV, and some of those have apps (including Skype). But I just don't trust the user experience and there's almost no way (I think) the grandma would be able to navigate any kind of menus or whatever to make it work. But. After a couple years of trying to get her to agree to let us buy her a new, nice flat-screen TV — I think she finally acquiesced. And my theory is that she saw things well on my laptop screen and the whole experience of "living in the future" kid of jostled her a bit. Maybe the new things do work a bit nicer than the older things.

And so on.

PS. And only very obliquely related: I eventually have to write up at least a little something about my other teaching experiences this autumn. I've been teaching a web programming class at ITP (NYU) and co-teaching with Bob Giraldi a more conceptual class over at SVA called "The Interactive Idea." And they're not exactly the same as the above, obviously, but I have sort of similarly been forced to retrace my own steps a bit and break down what I know about technology into digestible chunks for my students and it's a pretty revealing experience, for sure.

Our friends Nick and Nancy had their wedding down in Hilton Head, South Carolina on Saturday. (Congratulations!) I've never spent any time in that part of the country, so Christin and spent a few days in Charleston, as well. We went out last Wednesday and were supposed to come back Monday night, but crappy weather in the Northeast caused our flight to be cancelled and we wound up getting home yesterday, Tuesday. Apart from that flub, we had an awesome time. Charleston is very charming. Hilton Head doesn't have quite the urban charm, but the beach is gorgeous and we got some solid R&R time on the beach and by the pool.

Anyway, I'm not going to get too much into the gritty details, here — but I thought I'd post some photos for everyone. Not a full account of everything we did. Just some... stuff.

First: Some photos from our first day walking around Charleston:

In Charleston, we stayed at Two Meeting Street Inn (in the Music Room) — possibly my best hotel/lodging experience ever. The building had previously been an old home and they left it furnished as such. And the staff were the utmost of southern hospitality. And the porch was perfect for hanging out on while drinking iced tea and eating whatever little sweets they happened to have out.

That first night we ate at Husk, which we enjoyed.

And Thursday we took the ferry out to Fort Sumter. By the way: The weather through our entire trip was hot and sticky. Especially at Fort Sumter, but all over Charleston and Hilton Head. Whew.

And, of course, the wedding — our reason for being out there in the first place. Nick's family had a home on the beach, so they held the ceremony right there. Gorgeous spot! We even had a few spectators...

And the reception... Some teenage rock band played covers for the first few hours down kind of in some park. Pretty good, especially considering that they looked to be around 15. "Barracuda" was a hit, of course. Otherwise: More drinks, some food, toasts, dancing, and such!

We had a rental car for the drive back to the airport at Charleston, so we took some time after lunch to visit an Boone Hall Plantation. The house itself had been rebuilt in the 1920s, but there were original slave homes and other buildings scattered about. Interesting stuff (and the home itself — currently someone's real home, by the way — was pretty cool).

And so that's that! We're back home in Brooklyn, now. Back to work...

I did it. I bought Civilization V. Off of Steam (which I quite like, by the way). They had it discounted as a part of their Summer Camp Sale promotion. And, honestly, I've been reading about the game for months and I just couldn't help myself. Don't judge me.

My experience with the Civilization series of games goes way, way back. I actually remember the first time I heard about it: Two friends (Jason and Yirong) were talking about the original game on the bus home after school one day during what must've been 9th grade (circa 1992). An odd conversation about playing as the Germans or Aztecs or whatever and fighting battles and dealing with barbarians and such. "I realized they had settled on the other end of my continent!" It all seemed kind of mysterious, and even at age 14 or 15 these terms of history and culture carried enough weight that hearing them mixed up into bizarre and unreal configurations seemed pretty novel. Enough so that I still kind of remember the conversation (loosely).

Anyway, somehow I got my hands on a version for my little old black-and-white Mac Classic. Probably from Floppy Joe's, Austin's computer game rental place that eventually folded (I suspect) after lawyers got involved and accused them of facilitating exactly what I did to get a copy of Civ for myself: Piracy.

(I should make a side note about Floppy Joe's. First, I really can totally bring to mind the feel and layout of the place as I sit here just now. It sat up near 29th and Guadalupe in Austin TX, right next door to where the famous Toy Joy now sits. It's a place my mom probably remembers, as well, since she took me there fairly often after I got my first Mac. They rented computer games, which really kind of meant that the games with decent copy protection got rented and the ones without got pirated. And most Mac games back then didn't have very good copy protection. So that's how I wound up with stuff like Civilization, Kid Pix, Spectre, Oids, Prince of Persia, Zork Zero — games I could never have afforded to buy. Piracy is one of those very hard topics to deal with because on one hand, yes, I knew that my behavior skated on the bad side of the law. But I had so many seminal moments with games and just interactive "stuff" in general that I got from Floppy Joe's — I think there's a good chance that I wouldn't be where I'm at today as far as working creatively with technology if I hadn't had those experiences. I also remember being exposed there to stuff like shareware for the first time (back when shareware came on floppies you'd buy for a few bucks (yes, yes, yes — and BBSes)) and, of course, the vast world of PC gaming which I had no way to really participate in — although I could check out the boxes and try to imagine what was going on.)

Anyway, I played the hell out of it. Civilization's a remarkably addictive game. I remember phases of playing this game to the point of having dreams about military units moving around on the square grid and forming boundaries and blockades and skirmishing, building cities, trading, etc. On the one hand, I feel like surely there must've been something better I could've been doing with my time (I'm going to guess that this impacted my schoolwork). But then, looking back, I don't think Civilization is quite the worst game a kid could spend his or her time glued to. For one thing, every single element of the game has some sort of historical underpinning. For example (and, honestly, I could be talking about Civ 1 or Civ 5 twenty years later — the core game is almost identical): You start with one single band of settlers in 4000BC and play the game on a randomized planet full of islands and continents with a collection of competing civilizations. You might, say, play the Romans. And in this random world a bunch of other civilizations — the Germans, Americans, Zulu, Indians, etc — are also trying to grow and flourish. But the game tries to make the world "feel" like the world as it stood circa 4000BC and later 1AD and 1500AD and 1996AD not by flashing a title card and announcing "Now You're in the Industrial Age!" but by incrementally taking you from one phase of history to the next with things like the technology tree (where you must first spend some years researching agriculture which then lets you research horseback riding and eventually on to other more advanced technologies like gunpowder and semiconductors). So in a sense it kind of was a game about how resources and the sort of random arrangements of land and the starting points of civilizations along with their tendencies towards things like science or war can lead to different results for different people thousands of years down the line — kind of a gamified version of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Which may sound obvious. (I'm certainly not the first person to make that connection.) So I do wonder how much this one game might've influenced my outlook on how the general flow of global history works. I did, after all, play it well before I ever read Guns, Germs, and Steel.

I also remember picking up a certain amount of vocabulary from the game. "Phalanx" and "trireme," for example, are words which I first saw in Civilization which I them went and looked up and learned what meant. (The Extra Credit video series has a great piece up about this called "Tangential Learning" — written by the same James Portnow as the previous link.) This stuff does also seem important (and literally, like I said, the entire damned game is packed with historic and cultural references — there's so much to tangentially learn). To me, though, it feels kind of secondary to the bigger picture stuff about learning a perspective on how history "works" on a more fundamental level. But interesting, nevertheless. And healthy, no doubt. I'm going to guess that one major reasons kids do poorly in school — especially in subjects like history — is that they're expected to memorize the information, but not really use it beyond regurgitation in some way. When you need to know what a phalanx is in order to prevent Napoleon from barging in conquering your cities — you'll remember what the hell a phalanx is.

And I'm not going to argue that the version of how history works presented in Civilization is really the Way History Really Works. No one has that figured out. But it does present a picture, and I feel like if nothing else it put into my head a starting point — something which I could knock other ideas and experiences up against.

Anyway — that was then. I did pick up Civilization II (at Floppy Joe's, no doubt) a few years later (still in high school) and played the hell out of that, as well. And that was more-or-less the end of my life with the game.

Until.

They released a kind of lite version of Civilization IV for the iPad last year. Which I couldn't resist and played around with for a bit. Fun fact: It's great for flights because it doesn't necessarily take much thought (or reflexes, since it's turn-based) but is addictive enough that I can burn through an entire five hour flight playing with it — exactly what someone like me who fucking hates flying needs.

And so I saw Civilization V at a discount on Steam and decided to grab it. And I knew what would happen. Last weekend I kind of felt crappy, so I just played Civ for, like, ten hours over the course of a couple days. Until my brain started viewing everything in my real world fixed into a hexagonal lattice (Civ V uses hexes instead of squares — the most radical change in the game in 20 years, I think). And I made a mental agreement with myself to not play during the work day, but I've been sneaking an hour or two here and there while Christin's out or doing other things in the evenings. And I played about an hour earlier today. (And might play a bit more before dinner!) I don't have a ton of time and my brain just works differently than in did in the early nineties, so I'm not quite as compelled to just sit for hours and hours and hours playing with it — but certainly if all of my other engagements went away for a weekend I could probably fall into that trap.

So, yeah. One thing I've been thinking about during this play-through is just why it's so crack-like and addictive — if not to everyone, than at least to me. I guess I have a few ideas...

My first idea is simply that when I play Civilization, I'm not just fighting battles and trying to win the game or whatever. My mind constructs a story around the whole thing — a story of my own creation, mostly. And this isn't really done consciously — at least, I don't feel like I do something like "Well, now I'm going to sit down and create a narrative." I think it does have to do with the fact that the names of the peoples, cities, and such are real: I've been playing as the Americans, and when you found a city called Philadelphia, immediately my brain has some kind of resonance with that city, even though it has basically nothing to do with the real-world Philadelphia. (My Philly's landlocked mid-continent and on the edge of a desert.) But I guess it subtly makes you care about these things (or at least have an opinion on them) and it makes the differences between the fake and real cities kind of stick out in starker contrast. My Philly's on a desert. My Washington has city walls and the Brandenburg Gate. My Atlanta is just about the southernmost city in the world. It gives some connection to the game and it pokes that "what if?" part of my brain. And I guess that pulls me into caring about this new alternate reality history I'm building. I do find the alt history that is created over the course of playing a game to be very engaging and interesting.

The second idea about why I get so hooked isn't quite as high-minded. In Civ, there's just never any end to anything. There's always something in the middle of being built, or in the middle of being fought, or whatever. Since there's never a clear stopping point mid-game, like there might be in an FPS between levels or scenes or whatever, it's easy to get locked into an extended period of "oh, just one more thing." I know I'm susceptible to this because I do the exact same damned thing with the web sometimes: I get locked into these extended cycles of "oh, let me just see what's on Gawker — then that's it" through twenty-ish sites that'll last hours. In a way, the game does play itself to a certain degree, only bothering the player when it's time to make an important decision. So you can get locked into a trance-like period of pointing and clicking and responding. It's a game you can watch TV while playing. I'm not sure if this part of the game is good or bad or what, but I do feel like the designers have mastered the art of doling out little rewards at just the perfect rate to make it difficult for people like me to escape the game. (But at least I'm learning about triremes.)

Anyway. These are just a few thoughts on Civilization. I'm enjoying Civ 5, although I'll probably just finish with this run-though and then shelve it. I don't need to spend hundreds of hours at it. But it is nice to be reminded of these other bits of my personal history with the Civilization series and games in general...

So. Class #2. Werewolf didn't happen. I had my fresh deck of cards and everything. But. Only four kids turned up for class due to a field trip -- simply too few to play the game with. Sadly. Because I still think it's a useful educational game because it's so easily modified and extended. But it looks like I might not have a chance to test that idea since we're rapidly moving into the actual "make your own game" part of the class. And now that we're officially into learning GameMaker, I don't think we can turn back.

GameMaker. Since Werewolf fizzled, we spent most of our second class learning the basics of this mostly drag-and-drop game-making software. (This after another round of get-to-know-yas and a recap of our general definition of what a game is and a review of some terms from the first class.)

Teaching GameMaker is both easier and more complicated to teach than I expected. Easier because all four of the kids got it that first class. We downloaded it, along with a little pack of graphics and sounds that I put together for them to use -- mostly simple Nintendo sprites and a selection of sound effects that come pre-packaged with Mac OS X. And we got it installed in nothing flat on the four machines the kids were using. Great. And then I took them through the basic first steps. First, we made our player character. I had them make a sprite (and reviewed the definition -- something that appears on the screen and moves). I had them make an object that used that sprite. I had them make a room. I had them put the object in the room and attach a set of events that made it move in different directions when they pushed the arrow keys on their keyboards. Run. No problem. The kids know how to use computers quite well.

("Sprite" and "event" are two of our big vocabulary words, by the way.)

I found it a bit difficult to read their reactions, but I think they felt a nice little "whoa" moment when they saw their creations (as simple as they may have been) on screen and were able to interact with them. Processing, the Java-based tool used at ITP to teach programming, sort of had that same philosophy: The faster they can go from zero to seeing something move on the screen, the more students will be willing to learn. I know from personal experience that on professional programming projects there's a whole list of steps you have to go through before you even get to the point of seeing a blank screen when you run what you're working on. As experienced as I am, my first time playing around with GameMaker I felt it quite satisfying to just open the software, click on a few things, and poof -- simple game that runs right there. Took me five minutes. Took us as a class about maybe 15 minute to get to this first point -- really quick, honestly. That was the easy part.

The hard part will be on-going through the remainder of the class. It only consciously occurred to me during our second class that these kids would not be working on their games at home. This ain't grad school. Or undergrad. Or even, really, normal high school. And when it comes to talking about games and computer stuff at home... Well, okay. This may sound weird for a second, but might as well write about it and see what it looks like on the screen...

I'm a white boy from Texas. My high school happened to be largely black and somewhat hispanic, but there was definitely an unfortunate barrier, for the most part, between the Science Academy kids (mostly white, including me) and the normal student body (mostly not). And maybe that has nothing to do with anything. But -- it's inarguably true that I've never been in a high school outside of Texas. Certainly not one in Bushwick. So I feel like I don't have a clear grasp of what, really, the home lives of these kids might be like. It's not a huge deal -- they all seem reasonably smart, happy, and well-adjusted -- but I don't know what growing up in a minority community in Bushwick is like and so I find myself tripping on my tongue when I ask about things like computers at home. There actually may also be zero racial or geographic element to it -- I'm a very hardcore computer user and I'm surrounded by people who are nearly all very hardcore computer users of one flavor or another. Regardless of our incomes, we all have fancy computers and mobile phones and all variety of digital doodads. Maybe this isn't an issue of me not having a grasp on what the kids tech lives at home might be like -- it might be more of an issue of me simply not knowing what the average American's tech life at home is like. I don't know. This paragraph feels all sorts of weird and rambling, but I'll leave it in. I had no solid idea what the kids would be like before I first stepped into the classroom a few weeks ago, but the reality (so far) appears to be that this group of kids is not unlike my little group of nerd-friends in high school. So there's not a huge cultural bump, but these are all minority kids living in a very different sort of urban environment and that must have some impact on their outlook. Maybe I'm making more out of this than I ought to, but I feel it's worth being alert about. Anyway.

My point: It dawned on me that I couldn't assign them homework. So suddenly we're talking about a total of maybe eight or ten hours to learn enough of GameMaker for them to still have time to make their final project games. Which is the complicated part of teaching GameMaker, because one kid has already started talking about making his own version of RollerCoaster Tycoon (which, as a sim game, is already kind of a make-your-own-game game). And I'm already fielding questions about doing things with GameMaker which I'm sure are possible, but I don't know if we'll get to. (Especially given that I'm more-or-less learning this tool along with them.)

But they do seem to pick up what I teach them very quickly and all of them took the reigns and began playing around and experimenting with the software after I taught them each thing. The other stuff we did that first class included making enemies that walk around the screen, making walls to contain the level, and making collision events between the player, enemies, and walls. Basic top-down Legend of Zelda-style stuff.

So. Fast-forward one week to this past Tuesday. Five kids. And computer science teacher Andrew "Mr. Drozd" Drozd assisted instead of the usual Lisa Kletjian (although she stuck around for the first bit of class). More GameMaker. We started with a review of terms, which I think will be the new thing for each class. For those of you playing along at home, our current vocabulary list:

• Strategy
• Interactive
• Triple-A Games
• Indie Games (Interesting to note: Mr. Drozd asked if any of the kids new what "indie" meant. They didn't. So I had to clarify.)
• Sprite (The non-lemon-lime soda definition.)
• Event
• If-Then
• Loop
• Variable
• Relative (In a mathematical sense, because GameMaker always asks if you, for example, want something position in a fixed place on the screen or relative to something else.)
• XY Coordinates

So we're getting in a solid set of programming terms, which I like.

Alright. So that happened. And then back to GameMaker.

We had one new kid who missed the previous week, so I felt a little bit of a confusion as to get him up-to-speed without boring everyone else. But two kids immediately opened up their previous projects and started messing around with them (in a good way) and the other two kinda seemed to need a review, anyway, so I just took the new kid and that pair through the steps from the previous week. Funny thing though: One kid -- I swear she was just barely awake through the previous week's class. And seemed kind of uninterested and I had to kind of push her through each step. Not her fault on the drowsiness thing -- it's a long class at the end of a long day for these kids (4-6pm on Tuesdays, remember). But. This past Tuesday when we cracked open GameMaker, she totally remembered how to do everything. And I think actually quite enjoyed working with it. A nice surprise. And the other one who I thought might need a review also didn't need much of one. And the new kid picked it up quickly. So. Success.

Fun story: During this part of the class I poured myself a glass of pink lemonade (Lisa always provides drinks and snacks for the kids). And then managed to spill it all over my crotch in front of everyone. Good times.

So, we moved on to the new stuff. This time I had on the agenda three things: 1) Bullets. 2) Multiple rooms. 3) Points. And talking about bullets forced me to introduce the term "instance." And points, of course, required a quick discussion about variables. (As for teaching variables in a computer science context, game lives and points would seem to be excellent hooks to get kids to understand the concept.) And we did get through all of this by the end of class. One kid -- the new kid -- even got a crazy multi-leveled reverse bullet-hell shooter thing happening with a screen full of enemies and bullets flying absolutely everywhere. Another kid made a maze-like game where one had to maneuver around the level to get to the door to move on. I mean, they only had a few tools at their disposal, so they weren't going to create a wide range of games, but I was pleased to see they were coming up with different approaches.

Oh: And one kid found a sort of top-down zombie defense game made with GameMaker. And rather well-polished, as well, with good graphics and sounds. Like the zombie level in Call of Duty: World at War (but top-down): You're in a house with a gun and zombies are trying to break in and you have to kill them before you're overwhelmed by the flood. Definitely a game like games they had enjoyed before. But. Since made with GameMaker, I could prompt them to think about how the maker of that game might've built it. The kids knew how to make a player. They knew walls. Enemies. Bullets. Points. They had all of the pieces to make something like this zombie game. I think it was interesting for them to make that connection.

Another observation: For a couple of the kids, I don't think they had quite formed in their mind a difference between player and designer. On kid, especially -- the bullet-hell kid -- seemed to kind of treat the bullets and points as things you might upgrade as a player in a game like Call of Duty. So he made a million bad guys. And then kept increasing the bullet spray until he cold kind of wipe them out no problem. And then he made them each worth some massive amount of points and showed off his, like, 16-digit score. Which is fine -- nothing wrong with that sort of experimentation at all. But. Definitely funny. And a little insight into how these kids might think about making games, just the idea that they might need to develop a bit more of a designer's mentality as something distinct from a player's mentality. But. Game designers also aim to make experiences that are satisfying. And clearing off a whole screen of hundreds of enemies with a massive barrage of bullets is, indeed, satisfying.

What else? Oh, yeah. I set up the blog on its own domain (hidden from the world, for now, because of privacy concerns -- sorry) as to bypass the school's, ahem, dumb restriction on Tumblr. But we ran out of time and I didn't get a chance to get the kids going with it. I'm getting worried about this part of the class. I very much wanted to have them contribute to the blog, especially since so much of our in-class time will go towards GameMaker. But it may not come to pass. I'll give it another shot next week.

So that's about it. I haven't fully decided on what we're going to do next week. I'm guessing a vocabulary run-down, because that's become our thing to do at the beginning of a class. Might add a couple of new terms in there for 'em. And then more GameMaker. I've tentatively got a few things on the agenda, there: 1) Lives. 2) Scrolling levels. 3) General variables (like having a limited number of bullets and picking up new supplies). 4) Something else I'm forgetting right now.

Actually, I'm like half-sick right now. And sitting up on my roof writing in the dark because the fresh air is nice (and the wifi works up here, which is convenient). So my thinking may be a little generally muddled. But there you have it.

Onward.