As we mentioned in class, South Street Seaport is a fairly large space. Our first order of business was to fan out and examine various points of interest in the CPort. From my own perspective, when I first started walking towards the pier, I felt very bothered. I don’t think it was the tourists because I usually get angry walking through Times Square so I took a closer look at my surroundings. Everything looked too nice. Too constructed. Too commercial was the word that hit the nail on the head. From our initial research on the space, we knew that the CPort was a historically rich area of NYC. Manuel mused that we should watch Gangs of New York with DiCaprio. We imagined the CPort to have that kind of gritty legacy. It was a trading port with sailors and shiphands, so of course there was a level of seediness. However, that was all cleaned up and replaced with Abercrombie and Fitch. We felt the polar opposite from what we had expected.
Lots of History
Schermerhorn Row
Without lingering on this feeling for too long, we discovered a great location to camp out. We chose to examine the specific area passed the Pier 17 building and more or less under the Brooklyn Bridge. We chose this space because it seemed like every single tourist stopped here to take photos of the bridge. Brooklyn Bridge
Main Photo Place
There was a constant stream of tourists (approx 20 during lows and 40 during highs) with a high turn over rate during the time we were there (3:30-5:30pm on Saturday). We also noticed that while we weren’t doing anything, few people were asking us to take pictures. Tourists would switch off with one another in order to get their handsome mugs shot with the bridge in the background. This was interesting.
Loads of People All The Time
Here is a video:
After observing these few details, we started to combine ideas. At first we thought that it would be useful to create some sort of tripod-like object for tourists to use to take photos of themselves. People don’t like talking to other people, especially when that other person is a New Yorker (we’ll bite your face off). In reality, it’s just convenient not having to pester someone. At least that’s what I think. But the feeling of over-commercialization lingered in all of us.
I think I’m going to cut this post here and talk about our new ideas in the next one. Basically we feel that there is a need for tourists to understand the importance and significance of the South St. Seaport. If the space was still occupied by much of its former glory instead of a Gap and an Uno. There is the museum but even that’s overshadowed by rampant materialization and consumerism. Is there a way to highlight the CPort’s historical richness to tourists?
Instruction Sets for Strangers is shaping itself to be a very challenging but fun project. At first, I had an adverse reaction towards the need to go out into the real world and doing something. I didn’t want to leave the little protective bubble that was the building on 2 West 13th. However, a successful designer can’t lock him or herself indoors and be able to create widely used and beneficial products. No, a designer must study the world on many levels, interact with it, before any breakthrough conclusions can be reached.
Wow, why didn’t I ever think of this? It’s so stupidly obvious that anyone could have done it! But enough bickering and complaining–it’s a beautiful project nonetheless. Elegant, simple, and gorgeous. Hooray for MIT Media Lab!
We read Bartle’s article regarding 4 archetypes he discovered in MUDs. I’m very familiar with online multiplayer games and these archetypes come as no surprise to me.
For a very long time, I felt that online games with multiple user interactions were the best kind of game to play. I had a very discriminatory viewpoint against single player campaigns and especially against those games with no multiplayer content. For example, when I bought StarCraft I hardly played the campaigns and instead read about the stories online and from heard about it from friends—it was the formulation of rush strategies, rising up in the ladder, and playing island maps against the CPU with friends. I still prefer the online multiplayer experience (not to the MMO level) over the single but now appreciate well made single player campaigns with exceptional narratives.
During bootcamp, I recreated another gaming classic as a way to teach myself basic hit detection with Space Invaders. In following this tradition, I’m recreating another gaming classic: Brick Brickers. The thing that’s a little more complicated is the fact that there is a dynamic object, the ball.
I tried a couple ways to make the ball bounce. Some were too basic, some were too complicated. I found a very simple concept online in a tutorial (thanks Mr. Sun). The basic idea is that the bounce direction and intensity varies depending on where the ball bounces on the paddle. This bounce was also created between ball and bricks.
You can play the game for an infinite amount of time–even letting it bounce. You can never lose right now. There are counters of lives and levels but they don’t do anything just yet. Working in separate class files makes it a little more difficult to work with the stage. If this was done in the stage, then I would just use stop() and gotoframe() commands for gameover messages and etc… But for now, the game is 98% working. There is a bug here or there that I’m sure I haven’t accounted for.
There are two sources of inspiration/reference I used:
Mr. Sun’s tutorial for brick breaker (he did it all in the timeline, which I did not, but he provided me with some interesting code for angle of bouncing)
It’s a picture of the Hudson and the West Side Highway blocking the view. I can’t actually see this from my apartment (my views are boring) but actually from my sister’s place, who lives right next door.
There are some companies I love and there are some companies I hate. I have to say right now that I really dislike Apple. If there was another laptop option for me, I would have already been there. The only thing I can give apple is that their industrial design team is top-notch. Nothing can beat the physical builds of their products especially when it comes to the MacBook Pro. Unibody? Come on, it’s beautiful.
However, on all other fronts Apple is a hate-mongering business. They’re unfriendly and do not support innovation. Take for example their application approval process for the iPhone. It’s atrocious. A team of five or more developing an iPhone app is almost hopeless: lots of investment of money and time with small rewards split over those five or more people. Furthermore, I don’t know how many developers have eaten the dust because of Apple’s fear (ahem… GOOGLE VOICE APP).
With that said, this is going to make a huge dent in Apple’s current strategy because Adobe (<3) has announced Flash 10.1 that is being pushed to basically every device with a screen, minus Apple products. What does this mean? It means that mobile devices will have full Flash support. If the device has Tegra or Snapdragon, then they can output 720 and 1080 too! Yes for HD! But that's not all, Flash 10.1 also supports multi-touch and accelerometer information! Wait, did you say that I can write games in Flash now? Incredible.
I know that Apple will never approve because Flash 10.1 will circumvent and break so many things that are already wrong with their business operations. Screw iTunes, screw proprietary SDK's and programming languages. It's all about open source.
This is an assignment for Game Design I. We were assigned to play two games in the same genre, talk about which one was better and why, and then discuss whether or not they fit into that genre.
I played two games on Newgrounds. One was Dad ‘n Me and the other was Crunchdown. Both were found in the ‘Fighting’ genre. The first thing that I thought was interesting was the fact that both of these games are actually ‘brawlers’ or ‘beat-em-ups’. I want to point out the distinction between ‘fighting’ games and ‘beat-em-ups’. Fighting games like Street Fighter usually involve some sort of rock-paper-scissors mechanics where one move can defeat another, beat-em-ups have a far simpler mechanic (most of the time) and involve one or two attacks to beat down several enemies—far fewer tactics involved. The relationship between number of enemies and the number of tactics available is inverse. The more enemies on the screen, the less tactics become available. When there’s only one enemy, there are many tactics. An equilibrium is reached.
Rules make up the core of games. Without rules, there is no play and there is no game. The existence of various rules can create a plethora of experiences, emotional, intellectual–the list goes on. The exercises that I’ve been given in Game Design I have been playing with the ideas of rules. Sometimes we’re given certain play objects like a deck of cards that we have to incorporate–even that creates unique rules.
I’ve never really thought about rules applying to other mediums like fashion. Maybe during my 7×7 projects there were some rules/constraints that generated interesting ideas. However, the way in which I used constraints was very flexible and the outcomes were very diverse. Rules for a game creates a singular kind of experience.
For madlib and numguess, some of the functionality that was asked for in the original homeworks may not have translated. Previous functionality was satisfied in the previous homeworks but I did them all with interfaces so I didin’t know how to translate that into AS files. They’re very simple right now.
In TigerField, I got alpha changes working. Pretty simply actually. Neat looking.
Eric Chung is a student at Parsons in the MFA Design & Technology program. This blog is a collection of homework responses and posts. You can look for posts through the various tags available. Hopefully all relevant posts are tagged appropriately...
