I've made it to the conference in one piece--fortunately I was waiting for the bus early. I don't present until Friday, so I have the next few days to soak it all in. The list of presenters and demos looks pretty good, too, so I think I'll come out of this with some interesting new precedents to think about. Keynote's in ten minutes, so I'm off.

So I finally arrived in Athens. The Galini Hotel, while not exactly a "palace", is nice with a great view of the sea and a mini bar stocked with reasonably priced mineral water. That was especially key when I first got here. I missed my stop by a good margin and had to trudge back here in the heat of the in my suit jacket, wheelie bag in tow. Feh--I need to improve my ability to transliterate Greek. At any rate, I'm settled and rehydrated and due for a nap. More later.

Here are a few more videos from last week's session with ASU. The first is a math game for two players to help students learn about slope through physical and audio interaction. The players can listen to the change in coordinates and then try to determine the right slope based on their positions in three-dimensional space.

There are some issues here with finding the right location for the balls that will prompt some work in the future. Knowing, for example, that you are "on" the right point in the Z-axis may require different kinds of audio cues. One idea we've had is a kind of sonic prompt that fades out when you've hit your mark, but gets louder and louder as you approach the boundary between two integers. This, we hope, will help people visualize where the number 2 and 3 are, rather than floating on the boundary between them and continually triggering the audio sample.

The next video is an improvised dance that the students can choreograph as they each try to reach their X and Y coordinates. This is a variation on the "Coordinate Game" that we had developed the day before. Hopefully, students will get an embodied sense of how the Cartesian system works as they move along in their algebra/geometry units.

It's not quite a game yet, but there's something really fun and compelling about making your own art work (a dance piece) that corresponds to your math assignment.

I just discovered a bevy of research on the Enron email dataset. After the collapse of the company, all of the email from the roughly 150 ex-employees made it into a publicly available archive. This is a pretty valuable resource for people looking to test data-visualization ideas for social relationships. Hopefully, Chuck and I can find a way to use this in the fall for the collaboration studio we're teaching.

This is simple game we created as part of the SMALLab workshop here at Parsons. It's for teaching middle-school students how to figure out coordinates on a projected grid.

Each player takes their own origin as 0,0 and must reach the goal marker laid down by the teacher. The first player to correctly call out the coordinates of her or his goal marker wins.

Congrats to Christopher for his mad math dancing skills!

Here's more work on faking three dimensions on a flat plane.

Disco 3D: Behold the three dimensions!

Again, this only works from the perspective of the ball, so one person needs to hold it fairly near their point of view to get the effect. And, from the brief demo we did at the workshop, sometimes people need a few minutes to adjust to the effect before they feel like they're navigating space.

At this point, it seems like more of a fun demo or a parlor trick. One really good suggestion we got recently, though, was that we could give participants a button, say on a Wiimore, that would allow them to assume the first person perspective if more than one person is navigating the space. That might help share the experience a bit better.

For a few years now, I've been following an open-source games competition called Ludum Dare. Artists work on their own for 48 hours to produce a game based on a theme--this round used "The Tower". This year, with a weekend to kill, more or less, I decided to throw my hat in the ring.

What I came up with is Choke Point, a game about air-traffic control. I skimped on the art and didn't get sound working in time, but I like something about the mechanic well enough to develop it more in the future, maybe.

Choke Point

Feel free to try it out and tell me what you think. Or get the Processing source code and improve it.

Kind of off topic, but I just watched the Men's 400M Relay. Wow. Not only did the world record get crushed, but the Americans out-touched the French (who said they would "smash" our team) by eight hundredths of a second for the gold.

It's kind of the thing to be jaded about the Olympics, and I've been no exception. But I was literally yelling at the screen for the whole last 100 meters of the race.

Wow. Just wow.

I just finished reading Nicholas Lemann's article "Conflict of Interest" in the latest New Yorker. It crystallized a lot of the thinking I've done in the past few years about politics, all the way back to when I was an organizer for Democracy for America here in Hudson County.

I couldn't call my participation in the DFA effort as anything more than a failure, but it taught me a lot about the push and pull of real politics. As it turns out, I don't have a taste for that kind of work--I think I'm temperamentally unsuited for it. But it did drop the scales from my eyes. I stopping seeing the act of governing as a battle between good and evil, and, rather, saw it as the net result of conflicting and cooperating interests.

The Lemann article sums it up well, and I'd encourage anyone with an interest in the subject (or the engine) to read it. For me, it helped to gel a number of key components that ought to factor into games like this:

• Players should either represent an interest and compete for the attention of policy makers and the general public (Bentley's organizational interests)
• OR players should represent a policy maker who is beholden to interests--or, rather, requires the backing of a number of interests, none of which need be permanent or essential. A game of political survival rather than idealism.
• The game will involve, at its core, the pushing and pulling of different levers on a system.
• BUT this is NOT the game, no more than resetting a series of timers is Diner Dash
• Therefore, a game mechanic is needed that creates a sense of expressiveness, in Bogost's terms.
• And a narrative that explains the affordances of the "lever pushing" in the same way that waiting tables explains the timers in Nick's game.

That's what I have for now. More questions than answers at this point, but it makes sense for me to start taking apart some of the work from this spring's "iPod Game" and working out a mechanic for that kind system and logical interface.

We were experimenting with different ideas for how to represent the third dimension you have access to with the SMALLab installation. This is a trial using a camera viewpoint that tracks the position of the ball as you move through a space with it. It fools you into thinking that a 3d world is changing at your feet.

It's not a perfect solution. It only works for one person, and there are limits to how high you can pretend the Z-axis goes. Still, it's an interesting way of looking at the problem, and it might open more doors later on.