Friday's Food for Thought - 2/22/08

It's time for another Friday's Food for Thought! Sorry to get it up so late, but here it is.

Quote:

"We grow up hearing that trumpeters blew down the walls of Jericho, that Gabriel's trumpet announces the will of God, and that the largest and hippest of all animals, the elephant, has a trunk mostly (we think) for trumpeting. These grandiose images shape the classic trumpet persona: brash, impetuous, cocky, cool, in command. Anyone who has ever played in a band knows that if the conductor stops rehearsal because a fight breaks out, if somebody takes your girlfriend, if a tasteless practical joke is pulled, if someone challenges every executive decision no matter how trivial, it's got to be a trumpet player. That's just how we are."
- Wynton Marsalis

News Story: Google sponsors new race to the moon
I heard about this a while back, but now's as good a time as any to post it since there's a recent story about it. Google is sponsoring the Google Lunar X Prize, which has a $30 million prize for the first two teams to put a robotic rover on the moon that can transmit data and images to Earth. 10 teams have announced their entry into the competition.

The first X Prize was the Ansari X Prize, which was won by a team led by Burt Rutan (who I profiled a couple of weeks ago). To win the $10 million prize, Rutan's team had to put their privately-funded manned spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, into space twice in two weeks. There are a couple other other X Prizes now: the Archon X Prize for Genomics, in which scientists must sequence the genomes of 100 people in 10 days to win $10 million, and the Automotive X Prize, which is in development but will deal with "designing viable, clean and super-efficient cars that people want to buy."

Video: To show you all how I sometimes feel while editing stories for Harding University's newspaper, the Bison, here is "The Punctuation Police," courtesy of Picnicface.

Steven Spielberg's Video Game

Good ole' Steven Spielberg. We've learned so much about life through watching his movies. Such as never ever go into water above your knees because monstrous sharks are always lurking just a little outside of your vision. We also learned that aliens are adorable and should be kept in closets and protected from the all-seeing eye of an uncaring national government. Also, Nazis make the perfect bad guys.

One could make the case that Steven Spielberg knows a lot about what makes a good movie. He's been nominated twelve times for Academy Awards and has won three of those times. Not only has he racked up the nominations, but he has done it across four decades: from Best Director for Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977 to Best Producer for Letters from Iwo Jima in 2006. This man literally has a lifetime of experience in story-telling through cinema under his belt.

But now, the great film director has decided to try something new. It was announced some months ago that Steven Spielberg had contracted with one of the largest publishers of video games in the world, Electronic Arts, to direct two video games to be published under their label. One was to be a dramatic, narrative-driven game for the Microsoft XBox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3, and the other was to be a physics-based puzzle game for the Nintendo Wii. Few details were given, and much speculation abounded.

Could Spielberg make not one, but two great games that live up to his legacy as a director? Would he be able to direct a game that had very little narrative focus? Would EA shoehorn him into a budget and time frame that were impossible to accomplish like they have done for other developers? Would his games wind up looking like one of the many other craptastic games based on movie narratives?

The essential question derived from all of this is: Does Spielberg's directorial genius translate from the medium of moving pictures and narration to the medium of interaction, competition, and user-creativity?

I will admit, I was highly skeptical about this question for quite some time. No knocking Spielberg, but game design is hard work that few people can do with any success. However, now you can be the judge for yourself as to Spielberg's talent and ingenuity. Below is the very first video for his Wii game. It was released recently with little other information than its title: Boom Blox.

Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, so feel free to leave it in the comments. I believe that the video shows great ingenuity, and that Spielberg will prove he has a medium-transcending eye for design. If the game is released at a lower-than-normal price point, it has the potential to tear through the market as a must-have casual game.

Little is known of the progress of Spielberg's other game, but I'm feeling much less skeptical about both of them after viewing this video. Who knows, maybe he will even go the extra mile in his other game and throw in some Nazis!

Online Game - Fulfillment

I recently Stumbled Upon this little game from The Sect of Homokaasu called Fulfillment. Basically, it's a Tetris-like game of filling a space with uniquely-shaped blocks. There are many difference from Tetris, however, that make this game tougher and fairly addicting. In the first place, the blocks in Fulfillment don't drop from the top of the screen. They sit on the side and you must drag them onto the board within a certain amount of time. You also cannot rotate them. The pieces you have are the ones you have to fit in. The game starts with a 3x3 square and 3 pieces to fit in. The first level is extremely easy, sometimes even having simply three 3x1 lines that you drag onto the board. As you beat each level, the dimensions of the box and the number of pieces you have increase by 1. So the second level is a 4x4 square with 4 pieces. The pieces also start increasingly being more complex than normal Tetris pieces, becoming longer or having weird chunks missing.

I have only reached level 8. The game's difficultly starts ramping up fairly quickly as you get so many pieces to manipulate. Many times all you need to do is just be able to look at so many pieces and figure out how they fit then get them on the board in time, but at other times you will have to place pieces and continually be adjusting and readjusting them to fit them all. Each game only takes a few minutes, because once the game starts, it doesn't stop until you lose.

Fulfillment's taken up a good little bit of my free time in the past couple of weeks, so be careful if you start playing. Another thing it shares with Tetris is how you want to start a new game as soon as you lose one.

Friday's Food for Thought - 2/15/08

Well, you've arrived just in time for another delicious round of mind-morsels. I take only partial credit for the following due to the impairment of my congnitive functions by way of what the Americans call "drugs." I've spent the last three days in my bed watching Heroes, meanwhile being under the effects of multiple medications intended to aid me in conquering the common cold. So far, all I've gotten accomplished is twelve episodes of Heroes, but if you're going to be sick that's not a poor choice of how to spend the day.

Quote:

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

Indeed, this quote might summarize the challenge of blogging.

News:
West Virginia Radio Station Offers Free Valentine's Day Divorce For One Unhappy Couple

Video:
Big Train--Do You Speak English?



Hopefully nothing to terribly deep. Happy Friday to all.

Another University Shooting

A man shot with a shotgun and injured at least 17 people (the ABC News story says 19 people, including the gunman) and then took his own life at Northern Illinois University around 3:20 p.m. Central time.

A man described by witnesses as being thin, white, dressed in black and wearing a stocking cap walked into a lecture hall began shooting. There were no fatalities -- other than the gunman -- but three students are in critical conditions (AP story says four).

There is not yet information on who the shooter was or why he did this.

From the Washington Post.

-UPDATE-
Five people -- four victims and the gunman -- were killed (3 victims and the gunman at the scene; two later in hospitals). 22 people were shot in total. He had a shotgun and two handguns, and he came out from behind a screen in the classroom and started firing. The gunman was apparently a former NIU student who graduated in spring 2007 and had no criminal record. Police still have no motive.

From CBS2Chicago (Story posted at 9:13 p.m. Central)

-UPDATE-
A New York Times story has slightly more detail (some of which are slightly different than the other stories), but no new information than in the other stories.