From the video files… “Font Conference”

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“Why are they lying down, Daddy?”

My three year old son has an eye for detail.

Because they’re tired wasn’t going to cut it.

“Because they’re dead.” was the honest answer – and I believe in being honest to my kids. It gets rapidly worse though, as it always does.

“Why are they dead, Daddy?”

“Um, err, because my soldiers killed them.”

“Did you make your soldiers kill them, Daddy?”

At this stage, I gave up. There have always been games that I don’t play around my kids. Half Life, Bioshock and Company of Heroes are no brainers. I thought I could get away with Rome : Total War. The combat was reasonably abstract; no head shots or blood splatters here.

It turns out I was wrong. It had all been going so well, here I was entertaining both of the kids, getting in some ‘quality time’ and also doing what I wanted to do. Now another game has been consigned to the crowded time slot of ‘after the kids are in bed, the house is tidy and I’m still awake’.

Video games cop an awful lot of flak (some justified) these days. When I grew up, no one saw any harm in Space Invaders or PacMan. Playing Dungeons and Dragons though, was selling your soul to the Devil.

But I digress, and that’s a story for another post. What can a Father do to pass on his love for games to his young children when a huge portion of the games coming out these days are violent in nature? Quite a lot as it turns out.

Not long after the “Why are they lying down?” debacle, I downloaded the Spore Creature Creator demo. Wham! – there goes the weekend. Before I knew it my children are kicking me off the computer, creating creatures the likes of which the world has never seen before, making them dance and sending movies of them to their Grandparents.

And occasionally asking for help spelling the names they dream up. While not quite the success I’d hoped for in terms of me playing games, I couldn’t deny they were having fun, learning to be creative and exploring new ideas, and best of all, keeping out of mischief.

Then there was the minigolf game we found in a bargain bin one day. The kids love it, even if they can’t play it very well. Who cares? They just like hitting the ball around, and if it goes in the hole we all celebrate.

This last weekend, I downloaded the demo for Audiosurf – and I bought the full game about 10 minutes later. Anyone can play it, the game works well with any music – be it Vivaldi, The Wiggles or anything ‘as long as it’s Rock and Roll’ (my son’s favourite).

The moral of this story is that there’s a lot of good stuff for kids out there, and some of the best games are not marketed at kids. They’re just fun to play. No need to dumb it down, kids are smart.

Recently I was flown up to Wellington by the Ministry of Education, to participate in a Focus group on “Technological Modelling.”

Some researchers have been looking in to how schools teach technological practices to students, and they’re trying to improve the curriculum. We technologists (lol) were there to explain how we use modelling in what we do.

There was a range of people that were invited, from civil engineers to food technologists, a software engineer, a game developer (me), Electrical Engineers, and a Plastics technologist.

We in the game development industry are luckier than we think (well, those that get to do original IP) – other industries have a lot of things set out for them. They start off with many given constraints and starting conditions… whereas our constraints are our imaginations and our abilities.

Perhaps we just have the paralysis of choice… a world of possibilities.

The researcher talked about how in the process of finalizing a product/service/solution the ‘technologist’ has less and less influence on the final result. The questions at the start are somewhat like “Is it worth doing?”, but by the end they’re like “Should the upper widget be slightly more colourful?”.

We (the so-called technologists) talked about how that process plays out in our field, and the different ways we use modelling to prove concepts at all stages of the development.

Hopefully this is of some help to the Education sector in working out how to teach students about technology in a way that is far more relevant to the industry in general than it is now.
...in other words, I hope they get a better foot up in technology than I did!

It has been two months since Straylight was grounded in Auckland and the time has flown by. For those who don’t know, we have a temporary office space in the ICEhouse business incubation centre. We have now found new digs in the Newton Area, just off Newton Rd in Studio CO-4. Studio CO-4 houses several small design agencies ranging around most of the popular types of design. We are about to add a bit of new media / game design into that mix… I’m sure it will go well.

Our last day in the ICEhouse is this Friday (18th July) so we may be out of action for a little bit while the move is in progress.

Hayden’s Auckland tip of the episode: Don’t even bother thinking about driving on the motorway between the hours of 4 – 6pm.