Ask TOMBOT

xp

wtf? they are talking about couches then you say itlolians and he wants a killfile?

no no then jaymc shows up and asks kevin why hes killfiling him

OMG wait i understand LOLOLOLOLOLOL

wait cuz i dont

why is "chicago kevin" upset at "jaymc"?

For that backstory you'd have to read the Chicago thread for like the last year, chaks. I don't think any amount of curiosity is going to worth it.

chicago thread sounds real fun

ok then summarize please, laurel. this can only lead to lolz.

APPARENTLY I CAN'T STOP TAKING THE BAIT.

I AM MORAN!!!

I can't, I really can't. Please. This needs to just die.

Why would anyone be upset at jaymc?

Altho I spose someone could link the noise bored thread where he gave dates and times of my offending emails? I can't remember what it was called. Wd prob just raise more questions, tho.

oh man that was a GREAT thread!!!!!

chicago kevin vs jaymc is like andy rooney vs garrison keillor

it's fucking time already? YESSSS

It seems like you answered your own question, but if you still want my opinion, no.

lol who are you going to killfile

I don't killfile people, I banhammer people.

wtf? they are talking about couches then you say itlolians and he wants a killfile?

That seems like an accurate rundown, yeah.

why is "chicago kevin" upset at "jaymc"?

Because they are just very different kinds of people who don't get along well on the internet, or at all, as far as I can tell.

Why would anyone be upset at jaymc?

I've never really been upset with him myself except when he acts a bit dense, that can be really frustrating. But I'm sure everybody has their reasons.

Altho I spose someone could link the noise bored thread where he gave dates and times of my offending emails?

You're right, that is a thing which is totally possible.

i think it got deleted, actually

For the best.

poor jaymc

dear chaki,
i just thought you couldnt see jaymc's post because YOU HAD ALREADY KILLFILED HIM, so you didnt see where he was like do you hate me kevin circle one y/n

it was like a twilight zone thing,
pete

ps -

1. tom, what's your workout regimen these days? push-ups?
2. tom, who do you think can drink more in a sitting, me or mr. que?
3. tom, what are three specific things you want to do in 2008?
4. tom, hows yr aunt dixie?
5. tom, if you had it to do all over again, would you join the military?
6. tom, what's YOUR favorite miles davis album?
7. tom, what's you favorite non-cable TV show?
8. tom, do you like kate bush?
9. tom, where do you eat lunch in ballston?
10. tom, are you a strong swimmer?
11. tom, who do you think will be VP of the USA in 2009?
12. tom, im running out of shit here.
13. tom, where do you wanna go friday?

Tom, suggest a new way for me to eat a hamburger.

Tombot, why are you such a fearsome dude?

Love
Nath

1. tom, what's your workout regimen these days? push-ups?
2. tom, who do you think can drink more in a sitting, me or mr. que?
3. tom, what are three specific things you want to do in 2008?
4. tom, hows yr aunt dixie?
5. tom, if you had it to do all over again, would you join the military?
6. tom, what's YOUR favorite miles davis album?
7. tom, what's you favorite non-cable TV show?
8. tom, do you like kate bush?
9. tom, where do you eat lunch in ballston?
10. tom, are you a strong swimmer?
11. tom, who do you think will be VP of the USA in 2009?
12. tom, im running out of shit here.
13. tom, where do you wanna go friday?

1. Running up and down the escalators at Dupont two steps at a time, on both ends of my commute.

2. Mr. Que always stops after like beer #2 so we would never be able to find out. Probably you, because you keep hanging out with Le Bomb.

3. A. fix my sleeping schedule back to something resembling normalcy, B. eat more fish, C. a bunch of chicks

4. I'm not sure, she's been drinking a lot recently, and we can't tell whether her custom framing & gift/coffee/ice cream shop is making money or not.

5. Yes, they treated me pretty well and I made a lot of friendships that I fully expect to last the rest of my life.

6. I don't really have one, I'm more of a Mingus/Monk man. Trumpets and saxophones have never really been my thing.

7. NFL Football, Sundays from 1300-2330.

8. Nope.

9. I try not to, I prefer to wait it out until one of my evening coworkers starts "thinking outside the bun" or gets an inexplicable jones for Wendy's and pony up some funds for the run. There's also a cafeteria that I avoid whenever possible and Booeymonger's across the street that I'm sick of.

10. I certainly used to be, I haven't had to do any strong swimming in a long time though.

11. Ben Affleck.

12. That's too bad.

13. Somewhere we can sit down and have a beer.

tom please play that game and tell me your opinion. its v v small and takes 5 minutes.

Tom, suggest a new way for me to eat a hamburger.

Sideways.

Tombot, why are you such a fearsome dude?

Because people fear dudes they can't understand.

tom please play that game and tell me your opinion. its v v small and takes 5 minutes.

OK, but later tonight.

yay thanks.

dear chaki,
i just thought you couldnt see jaymc's post because YOU HAD ALREADY KILLFILED HIM, so you didnt see where he was like do you hate me kevin circle one y/n

i saw but that still doesnt explain WHY he hates him. futher postings on this subject to malkovitch thread please.

chaki:

That game is not v v small, it was like 2 MB. A game that looks and sounds like that should fit in about 640kb, no more. I got a score of 606 and then I died of old age. I don't think I'm going to recommend that any other games ever use "die of old age" as the primary mechanic. But it's hard to be harsh on a game made by one dude in his spare time that only lasts five minutes and is completely free.

the dude has a crazy life plan.

keep walking to the east until his hair falls out, looking for chunky treasure and then eventually turning into a gravestone?

the game designer apparently lives in total misery

http://cultivation.sourceforge.net/

his other game.

Cultivation Discussion

by jcr13 Wednesday, January 17, 2007 [12:26 pm]

http://cultivation.sourceforge.net/screen7_small.png Version 7 of my game Cultivation is available as a free download.

Cultivation explores the social interactions within a gardening community. You lead one family of gardeners, starting with a single individual, and wise choices can keep your genetic line from extinction. While breeding plants, eating, and mating, your actions impact your neighbors, and the social balance sways between conflict and compromise.

Cultivation features dynamic graphics that are procedurally-generated using genetic representations and cross-breeding. In other words, game objects are "grown" in real-time instead of being hand-painted or hard-coded. Each plant and gardener in the game is unique in terms of both its appearance and behavior.

For those of you who have found Cultivation to be confusing in the past, the game now includes an extensive in-game tutorial. The user interface has also been polished quite a bit, and one crash has been fixed. This is the version that I will be screening at Slamdance this coming weekend, so it counts as a "final" version.

Cultivation is certainly an unusual game, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good. From my experience, some people absolutely love it, while others absolutely hate it. I'm pretty happy with this reaction (much better, I suppose, than everyone simply agreeing to shrug their shoulders about it). It's intended to be an "art game," after all, and mixed reactions go with that territory.

This seems like an appropriate time to explain a bit about what I was trying to do with Cultivation.

I live with my spouse and child in the small town of Potsdam, New York. We're pretty active in our community, through our food co-op, through our town's fight about Wal-Mart, through the non-profit Seedcorn, and even through our controversial choice of landscaping.

Throughout my three-year experience as an active community member, I observed (and participated in) many conflicts that erupted. Some conflicts were over relatively small things (like paper vs. plastic bags for co-op-made bread), while others were over much bigger things (like a 186,000 square foot store being built in our 15,000-person town).

I was discussing the Wal-Mart fight with a veteran of the local activism scene. He brought up the idea of "using war as a metaphor" for our struggles---he said that these days, he strives to avoid thinking about community issues in terms of win-or-lose and us-or-them. Instead, he said, the community itself, and the relationships in it, are the most important thing.

A few days later, I was discussing the Wal-Mart fight with a Christian. He talked about how the fight had created a terrible discord in our community, and that the damage caused by that discord was worse that whatever damage having (or not having) Wal-Mart would do.

Those two conversations caused me to think about how I approach conflict in real life, but they also caused me to think about game design. Many games deal with conflict, but almost all of them paint conflict as black-and-white. These game reward scorched-earth victories (and may make such a victory the primary goal).

I wanted to make a game that explored the subtle trade-offs involved in conflict. On the one hand, you want to fight for what you think is right, but on the other hand, the fighting itself can have enormous costs for both sides. Is it better to compromise with your opponents and end up with a result that only seems half-right to you? This conflict balance is lurking everywhere, from small community squabbles to the global "war on terror." For example, should "we" negotiate with "terrorists?" That is a difficult question, certainly.

Of course, every conflict has a setting, and I needed one for my game. I didn't want to make yet another game about war, so I spent many months thinking. I could make a game about a Wal-Mart fight, but that felt too much like jumping on the persuasive games bandwagon (there's a McDonald's Video Game, but did I want to be the creator of the Wal-Mart Video Game?). I was feeling particularly stumped on June 16, 2006, so I took a walk out into our backyard garden to clear my head.

The general mechanic I was considering at the time revolved around compromise---sometimes, it might be best to give up something that you want in order to end a fight with your opponent and move on. You could think about this general mechanic in terms of gaining and losing ground. While I was sitting in my garden, an idea came to me: when neighbors are growing food together, conflict might erupt over the boundaries between neighbors' plots.

Back in the house, I scribbled down eleven pages of notes in what felt like eleven minutes. Those eleven pages were a rather complete---albeit rough---design document for what I would eventually call Cultivation.

The next three months were consumed by coding as I turned the design into a game. Implementing the mechanics for the social simulation was relatively easy. As far as "content" was concerned, I already had the groundwork for a nice solution---for years, I had been exploring genetic algorithms for content generation, but I had never found any use for the fruits of those explorations. Applying these ideas to Cultivation, I tried several ways of mapping genetic parameters to plant leaf shapes, and I finally came up with an algorithm that carried out a rough simulation of cell growth to fill a texture map. My first test of this algorithm simply generated 50 leaves and saved them to disk as image files. Watching a slide show of the resulting images stunned me---I was looking at some of the most beautiful 32x32 pixel images that I had ever seen. There were endless variations of form, and just when I thought I had seen every possible "style" of leaf generated by this system, I would stumble upon yet another leaf that looked like nothing I'd seen before. Still to this day, while testing Cultivation, I am surprised by the unique and interesting plants that appear on my screen.

With this success behind me, I continued to apply genetic and procedural ideas to the rest of the graphical content: to flowers, to fruit, and to the gardeners themselves. When I was finished programming all the content, I had a graphical game without a single pre-rendered texture map or sprite. This was a game with endless visual variety that still fit on a single floppy disk.

In the initial release of Cultivation, neighbors would respond to encroachment with both counter-encroachment (claiming some of your plants as their own) and social scorn (refusing to mate with you). With only these mechanics in place, fighting just didn't feel serious enough---a fight could continue indefinitely without any real consequences, since after two plots overlapped completely, no further revenge was possible for either side. I had to think of a more serious act to crown the peak of an escalating fight. Poisoning, which is now a key mechanic in Cultivation, fit perfectly. This mechanic allows an angry neighbor to poison a plant. Poison not only kills the target plant, but it also renders the ground around the plant forever unusable.

With poisoning in place, fighting has a serious consequence: part of a common resource (fertile ground) is ruined for everyone. Thus, the mechanics of the game underscore what I was trying to explore as an artist. This leads me to the point of this article: games can convey a message in a way that other media cannot.

As an example, let's consider the novel as a medium for conveying a message. First of all, we could come right out and state our thesis to the reader: "Conflict can cost both sides more than either stands to gain by winning." Of course, a bald statement like this might not be very convincing, and it is certainly not much fun to read. Instead, we could tell a story in our novel that somehow illustrated this point (the book/film House of Sand and Fog comes to mind). Even if we never come right out and state our thesis in plain words, a perceptive reader would hopefully understand the point of our story. After using either a direct thesis statement or an illustrative story, however, we have pretty much emptied our "novel" toolbox. The same set of tools are available in the other non-interactive media, such as film, audio, or painting.

With games, we have those tools, too. We can come right out and state our thesis (by displaying text on the screen, or through a voice-over). We can also tell a story with our game that illustrates a point (as many adventure games do). We have one addition tool, though: we can construct mechanics that illustrate a point---mechanics that tend to lead the player down a particular path and toward a particular conclusion. For example, instead of telling a story about characters that find themselves trapped by a difficult decision, we can actually trap the player with a difficult decision and let the player experience the consequences of the choice that he or she makes.

In Cultivation, the game system teeters on the verge of uncontrolled conflict, and the player can make choices within this system that affect the balance. Perhaps it is impossible to win the game by acting only out of self-interest, but likewise, it may be impossible to win acting only out of altruism (I say "perhaps" here because, even as the designer of the system, I have only explored a tiny fraction of the game's possible permutations). Players can directly see the results of the choices that they make.

In his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster explores the idea of building mechanics that explore artistic messages in great detail, so I won't discuss it further here. I will say, however, that I strongly believe we should be doing this.

If we want to tell a story, why not just write a novel or make a film? If we are making art games, we should take advantage of the strengths of our medium: we should use interactive mechanics to help the player explore our points.

selling mom's volvo was the best decision we ever made!

Recomend me a wordpress theme please

http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/1-column/6/basic-10/

tombot when's the last time you were in a fight and what happened

A british motherfucker tried to start shit with me on the floor of the Luxor while I was returning from a wedding reception and I told him to step off, he slapped me, ran off, then the casino security and LVPD showed up like SNAP. I didn't feel like pressing charges, I gave a description and went to bed.

Every time I've been in a real fight, I've always come away feeling like I got the worst of it, and all witnesses involved have told me I beat the living shit out of my opponent. I'm not sure what that means, especially since the witnesses are usually right, and despite my best efforts I never believe them

I think what it boils down to is that I always have extreme regrets with regard to violence, despite apparently being better at it than the dipshit fucks who attempt to use it against me

but that's pretty self-aggrandizing

The guy who attacked me in London walked away with a destroyed shirt and probably quite a fucked up face, while I woke up the next morning looking exactly as I had the previous morning. The only difference for me was a feeling of terror that followed me for almost the entire day.

Next question.

sounds like the appropriate response to me

so why you so down on modern techno so much

excuse me, 'recent electronic music' rather

techno just never seems to have washed the taste of its own ass out of its mouth after crawling all the way up in there in about 1999. I liked it when it was a movement of sound, not a trendsetting intellectual exercise. It grew and grew and then it obliterated itself into bellybutton shit. See "disco." Also, I'm not into beatless software masturbating. See "I can twist the knobs on my own AM radio receiver for free."

your addendum to your own question actually provides a more succinct zing answer than I ever possibly could

why you break heart all of time

clear answer though

i'm guessing you have access to the google analytics account? how many unique users do we average a day?

Tombot,

Are 'Friends' Electric?

Also, is the Tubeway Army superior to the U.S. Army?

sanskrit, I don't actually, but probably the number is a lot higher than your think.

Nicole, no to both, I'm afraid.

tombot, will the patriots win the superbowl?