kellee's blog

cycling74 is currently featuring a number of artists, researchers and educators that are developing and showing work on Max/MSP and Jitter. I highly recommend this site, as it is always inspiring to see such wonderfully rich experiences are being created with the beautifully low-tech Max solution. (But where was Perry Hoberman??)

One of my personal favorites was David Tinapple's piece, Debate Breath:

from the artist:
"This 15 minute video is a collection of all the silences found in the first 2004 presidential debate. In November of 2004 I analyzed the first presidential debate. I developed a software system (Max/MSP/Jtter) that could detect silence in the video track of the debate. It scanned the footage and produced over 1200 edit points where the audio became totally silent. These edit points were translated into a Final Cut Pro EDL used to make the actual edits. None of the editing was done by hand.

I was surprised to find that a full 15 minutes of the 90 minute debate was silence. Watching just these silences, it becomes apparent that although the "content" has been stripped away, there is still a real debate going on. This second, silent debate is one of gesture, glance, posture and interval. The silent debate is possibly more potent than the original one.

People reaction to this video are interesting, at first there is always laughter, which soon settles into a sort of stunned expression. People react to the sliences of these two men just as though they were talking. Whether you like or dislike one of them you find that absent their words, your feelings remain activated.

This video also appeared on the Chaise DVD in the spring of 2005."

Posted by at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In response to Erin's feedback on my last post about the Santiago Database Documentary, I am posting a few photos my father sent me of his home in Cuba. A little piece of Carribean comfort in these hectic school-year times.

This home was used as a government building after my family was forced to leave, and is now used to house several families.

Posted by at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

At my internship this fall, I have been assigned the task of combing over a gigantic spreadsheet that contains all of the dialogue in an upcoming game, and checking that every last line is on the "approved dialogue" document.

And, for the first time, I am experiencing Computer Eye Strain. How do office people deal?

I found a helpful link on the subject, and thought I would share it with my computer colleagues.

Computer Eye Strain: How to Relieve It

Posted by at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

http://www.unitedforpeace.org/calendar.php?calid=15001

Posted by at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is an article, How Chess Computers Work, which outlines a three-tree diagram method of analyzing chess strategies. Apparently, the total number of moves gets to 10 to the 120th power.

Posted by at 8:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My other strong candidate for a thesis proposal was an interactive documentary about my father's side of the family. I am now using it as material for my assignments in Business of Interactive Media, as way of exploring the practicalities of taking on this project after I graduate. I find the subject matter extremely compelling, and I am lucky enough to be related to it, which drives my passion.

Currently, I am titling the work simply, Santiago. I plan on continuing to blog my currently limited research on it(hard to do with so many other third year projects to accomplish), but I would love feedback and, of course, to inspire participation in others who might also be interested.

Yesterday, an article was published in The Chicago Tribune about the restoration of the beautiful modernist homes in Cuba that were abandoned by the families that originally owned them when Castro came to power. My father's(Jose Santiago) childhood home was featured, and he was interviewed for the article. Below is a caption from the article, which I think gives a pretty good introduction to the story:

***********************
Jose Santiago remembers the day in early 1960 when a young Che Guevara, dressed in fatigues and trademark black beret, came to his family's new home for dinner.

Like many wealthy Havana residents, the Santiago family had recently moved into its dream home, designed by a hot young architect and featuring shiny terrazzo floors, geometric stained-glass windows, floor-to-ceiling shutters and a whimsical, wing-shaped roof.

Baccarat cognac glasses rested on a living room partition, and outside, in the carport, sat the family's 1959 Cadillac Fleetwood and a Chevrolet Impala.

Guevara was there to speak to Santiago's father, a powerful businessman who headed the Tobacco Exporters Association of Cuba. Santiago, now 62 and living in Midlothian, Va., remembers Guevara sitting at the dining room table and bluntly telling Santiago's dad, Mardonio, "The mission of this revolution is to get rid of people like you."

Several years later the Santiago family was gone, having joined hundreds of thousands of Cubans who fled into exile and left behind scores of magnificent modernist homes.
******************
Read the rest of the article.

Posted by at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Pit
Justin Perez, John, Rick Nelson, Kellee Santiago

Dramatic Elements
Each player in the game represents a trader trying to corner a specific part of the agricultural market (corn, wheat, barley, oats, etc.). It is supposed to be a simulation of the trading pits in the stock market.

Formal Elements
In the basic version of this game all players are dealt nine cards. For every player in the game there is a different type of card in play. The object of the game is to make trades with other players in order to collect all nine cards of any single suit to “corner” that market.
After the cards are dealt all players are free to trade 1-4 cards with any other player as quickly as possibly. When a player wants to make a trade he/she shouts out the number of cards they want to trade and anyone willing to match it accepts the offer. All the cards that a player trades have to be of the same type. There are no restrictions to the number or frequency of trades that any player makes.
Once a player has nine cards of the same type he/she rings a bell in the center of the table and the trading stops. Points are awarded based on which market is cornered. Then the cards are reshuffled and dealt again and the trading repeats. Once a player reaches a set goal he/she is the winner.

One variation of the game includes two new cards: the bull and the bear. Two players per hand would have ten instead of nine cards. Trading happens like the basic version, but at the end of each hand, the player holding the bear card subtracts 20 points from their total score. If the winner holds the bull card and nine cards of the same suit they receive double points, or they can hold the bull card and just collect eight cards of the same suit (no bonus). If the bull card is in someone’s hand other than the winner, they also subtract 20 points from their score.

Dynamic Elements
Each type of card has a different point value. Wheat was the highest at 100 points and oat was the lowest at 60. These varying point values caused players to not treat all types of cards the same, even though you had to collect nine cards to win, regardless of value. It was very common for everyone to pass off the oat cards to the other players, and to hold onto any wheat cards they had, at least early in each hand. The most common winners were corn and barley, which were in the middle of the point scale.
Introducing the bull/bear cards into the game also created a dynamic element. The group usually had a pretty good idea of who held the bear card at certain points in the game and would reject all trades from that person in order to avoid the bear. The bull card seemed to have little effect on the game. During all our play tests, a bull market double-points bonus never occurred.

Stories From Play
The simplicity of this game provided a very fast paced, fun playing experience. No single hand lasted longer than a couple minutes and entire games could be played in about 20 minutes. Because so many different hands are played, different strategies came up during each hand.
During a lot of the game, trading away four cards at once became a popular strategy. Getting rid of a suit which you already owned a large share of would seem like a bad strategy, but often if you got stuck trying to collect one thing and then traded it away you could completely change what your goal was for the hand and pick up a quick win. Big trades were so effective that some players would try and trade five or six cards at once (against the rules).
As mentioned before, during the bull/bear market version of the game, we often knew who had the bear card (usually because when someone got it they’d react with, “dammit, the bear again.”). During one particular hand, everyone knew John had the bear card and would not trade with him. In response, John had to promise not to give away the bear card in order to keep making trades.
The most interesting scenario came in our last hand when Rick was dealt exactly two of each of the five card types. The strategy he came up with was to simply refuse to trade with anyone, preventing anyone from every being able to win the game. The idea behind this was that the game would reach a point were everyone would have seven of one suit and two extra cards. Rick’s idea was that everyone’s two extra cards would be of the same suit and he could quickly collect them once everyone figured out that they needed to trade with him to win, and he would then have a complete set. Unfortunately, the strategy backfired because the first trade he made completed John’s set and John won the hand and the game.

Posted by at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

El Grande
A Game Review

Kellee Santiago
Joni Cheng
Rick Nelson
Herb Yang

2-5 players in Multilateral Competition

The goal of the game is to have the most points by the end.

In order to earn points, you want to put your cabelleros in various regions of Spain. Each region has a point value for the player with the most cabelleros, the second most, and the third most, if you are playing with more than three players.

You can also earn points by placing your cabelleros inside the castillo. A strategic advantage to the castillo is that after the cabelleros are counted, each player then secretly chooses which region to place them in. Everyone reveals their destination at once, so the castillo acts as a way of hiding each player's strategies from each other, for an element of surprise.

(El castillo.)

There are three "counting" rounds in the game, during which the caballeros are counted up, and points are awarded occurdingly. There are extra points awarded for having the most caballeros in the region the King is in, and also if a player dominates the region with his Grande.

At the start of the game, each player has a stack of cards numbered 1-13. At the beginning of each round, the players have to lay down a card, and then the next one chooses whether to lay down a higher or lower card. The advantage of lower cards is that they give you more cabelleros to play with, and the advantage of the higher cards is that the player that lays down the highest card begins the round.

(Las tarjetas.)

Once the order is determined, the first player decides among five action cards to play or discard. They then execute or discard the card, and move caballeros around on the board.

Our Play Experience
It didn't take as long as we thought to figure out the game, but Chris had given us a fair warning, and the instructions were really well-written and easy to understand. As with any new game, it took a little while for us to figure out strategies, but by the end we were fairly even-matched.

One unusual aspect about this game is how points are awarded to second and third place settlers. These minor awards can really help keep a player alive, and potentially, through clever strategizing, could lead to a win.

The way each player could hide their strategies was really interesting, and created a very dynamic system, since you really had to work at seeing your opponents' strategies. It will most likely lead to many varied play experiences, depending on who plays with whom.

Although there were many resources, there was such a surplus of them, this game seemed to be more about strategy than about building a bank. That is to say, it was more about resource management than about aquisition.

We all enjoyed the premise - that we were conquistadors settling Spain. It was an original play premise that was really aided by the board design, and the language of the game (castillo, cabelleros, etc).

(Rick lee las instrucciones.)

Criticism
The interface had too many pieces that look similar to one another.

For example, players use a cabellero token to traverse a track around the edge of the board to keep score. Since Cabelleros are used for many other things, it would have been more helpful to have players keep score on a notepad or use differently-shaped pieces. Also, there isn't a strong visual distinction between the various card types. Action cards use the same types of icons as the cards the player uses at the start of the turn. This made it confusing deciding what to do with the cabelleros during the different phases of the turn.

To Summarize
El Grande showed us a very dynamic, creative board game system. However, like with many board games of this size, the experience could be simplified with some basic interface touch-ups.

Posted by at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Play an Online Game" The Game
by Kellee Santiago and David Gelb

Players: 2 or more
Ages: All Ages

Rules:
1. No off-line discussion. Players must communicate online, through in-game texting programs, or third-party programs.

2. The game you are trying to play must be entirely new to all players. Added challenge: if the games are in a different language

We decided to go on Chris's recommendation, and visited Brettspielwelt.

(Entering the dangerous world of Brettspielwelt)

After wrestling our way through some of the iconography, we eventually figured out where the games were. I was in the lead at this point, but since, in order to win we have to cross the finish line together, I gave David instructions on how to catch up and eventually we were looking at the same page.

At this point, things became quite difficult. When we tried to get into a game, we would just sit on a loading screen. We tried different "rooms" and different games, but to no avail.

(Pretty colors and moving text, but it's really such a tease.)

At this point we had been playing for about an hour and a half (dinner break and bussiness call included), and were very eager for our work to come to fruition. Especially since now we had the added challenge of a time constraint - I had to leave the lab by 12:00 and it was already 11:40!

It was at this unfortunately late time that David discovered the page with the Instructions and FAQ. He discovered a program we needed to run, but couldn't figure out where the english version was. It took me awhile to find the link to it (it was cleverly hidden in a bunch of text). It was only after I finally downloaded it that I noticed it wouldn't run on my macintosh.

(It's all German to me.)

(David was awarded with solitude, as he sits sadly alone in the room.)

Our game of "Play an Online Game" was pretty exciting, and initiated a lot of interesting discussion while we were playing. Most german games I've played are hard to get a handle on the first time around, but improve with more play. However, I think this game might lose some of its spontaneity with attempting to repeat the first experience.

Prologue:

David did finally figure out how get into a game and played against a stranger, while I remained on the sidelines, clutching my macintosh laptop and praying for the client to eventually just work.

Despite having read the instructions several times because of all of our trial and errors, David still wasn't able to figure out how to win or strategize against his skilled opponent. Or was his opponent skilled? There was no way of knowing, but hey, maybe that's the fun of it.

Posted by at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We have had a number of dicussions about the validity of advertising within games, but what about using games AS advertising? Kinda like "interactive commercials?" AXE, the company that makes body spray for men, produced a game entitled Mojo Master for just that purpose.

The goal of the game is to flirt with different types of girls in order to get them to come home with you. The mechanics of the game work like Magic, or similar card games, where you can collect different moves to use against your "opponents."

The game is completely free to play (only for PCs, though); just promise you'll think of purchasing AXE next time you are looking for a body spray, ok?

Posted by at 8:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)