The Sunday Poem: BASIC

 Posted by (Visited 5476 times)  Game talk, The Sunday Poem
Aug 262007
 

Anyone who has programmed for a long time knows the weird feeling when a new language comes along and up-ends your assumptions. It’s certainly true that you basically learn to program once, and then learn many syntaxes. But it’s also true that programming languages bring along ways of thinking. So here’s a silly poem about that feeling.

BASIC

Who would think the line numbers would go astray?

Instead each order is atomic, each action is its own,
Standing individual like citizens, instead of operations.

And what is this inheritance? This oh oh pee? A gosub’s
Gone from subroutine to type! Variables once global
Now can var, can pointer, enum, local, scope!

Hell, there’s more than just one sort of number! A number is a number,
Dammit.

Well, hex and dec, sure. And binary, I guess.

But quit making simple complicated! Where’s the jump table,
Accumulators, and my register’s gone? Damn kids these days.

Haha. I put a function declaration in a header.

This is kinda neat.

GigaOM goes to HiPiHi

 Posted by (Visited 6515 times)  Game talk
Aug 252007
 

Wagner James Au was in Beijing, so he stopped by the HiPiHi offices.

Alas, he didn’t return with a guide on how to pronounce the name of the company. But he did return with lots of details about the virtual world, which is expected to launch a US beta in October.

For a Second Life user, the most striking thing about HiPiHi is how similar its interface is – reverse-engineered is probably the more accurate term. (This despite the fact that Second Life’s confusing user interface is easily its weakest selling point.) Xu said he conceived of the basic idea before even knowing about Second Life, but it’s abundantly clear he and his team have modeled a lot of HiPiHi on it. Like Second Life, content is streamed from the networked HiPiHi servers — which comprise the world — to users’ computers.

Austin Game Developers Conference schedule

 Posted by (Visited 5800 times)  Game talk
Aug 242007
 

AGDC is coming up, and here’s my speaking schedule:

Designing for Everywhere

  • Raph Koster

 Wednesday, 11:00am — 12:00pm Online Games – Design/
60-minute Lecture

In the last few years, big strides have been made towards understanding how games work, in a bones-and-blood sort of sense. We now understand much more than we did about the interactions between mechanics, the pacing of goal structures, and the way in which aesthetics and “dressing” work with the game structures. This can lead towards new ways to create games, ways that work better with our increasingly wired world. The rising wave involves user participation and creation, multiplatform, always connected entertainment, and rapid development. In this lecture, we’ll explore design and technology approaches that push towards the goal of “play anywhere” using these criteria as design principles.

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Anarchy on-line

 Posted by (Visited 6795 times)  Game talk
Aug 232007
 

No, not the game. The article on CNN, for which I was interviewed, and which is mostly about griefing, but somehow ends up at the avatar rights issue. 🙂

“In computer science there’s this term — an N² problem,” explains Koster. “This is where, as you add more things to a system, each new thing interacts with all the existing things so that problems scale exponentially rather than lineally. Human behavior is a kind of N² problem.”

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