The commercial that launched the Mac aired only once, during Super Bowl XVIII, and it is credited for starting the Super Bowl creative commercial competition among ad agencies. It is considered to be one of the most innovative commercials of all time, on a number of levels. Advertising Age selected it as the "Commercial of the Decade."

It has its own Wikipedia entry here. Wired Magazine online gives an interesting history of it here.

But you really need to watch it here.

- Hap

... is without a doubt one of the finest hours on television.  There are only nine episodes left of this final season.  Watch them.

- Hap

One of the questions that often comes up in discussions of game design related to education is "What makes a good educational game?"  I think it can be reasonably argued that there are truly very few examples of good educational games, and that is due to several reasons, some of which I will point out below.

One person that lays out the case well as to why it is difficult to create good educational games is Dr. Seymour Papert of MIT.  In the June, 1998 issue of Game Developer magazine, Dr. Papert presents his take on the state of educational gaming in an article titled "Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning."  A point that he makes is that edutainment software often ends up being a combination of the worst of both the education and entertainment worlds.  Having been both a professional game developer as well as an instructional designer, I very much agree with Dr. Paperts assertions in the article.  Here is a link to the article online.  In addtion to the original article, the link has a response to Dr. Papert written by an instructional designer.  Both pieces are worth reading.

While there are questions and concerns regarding the cost of game development (monetary, time, and technical expertise), there are ways of incorporating game design best practices into curriculum as well as developing games using rapid development tools (as opposed to using lower-level languages--comparatively speaking--such as C++).  Flash is one development option, as is its older and more powerful cousin Director.  Or one could use other development environments such as Runtime Revolution for its rapid application development capabilities.

Most people when talking about computer games usually mean something other than the trivial approach of a Jeopardy game.  Customizable Jeopardy templates are fine for drill and practice, but that does not exemplify compelling and deep gameplay of the type that promotes higher-order learning.  But before we begin to consider our design tool options, we would do well to originate some actual game ideas--apart from the underlying technology.

As is common in the game industry, we should brainstorm first and worry about execution later.  Anyone have any ideas to offer?  Consider games in the genre of the Civilization series of the Age of Empires collection.  Those games have true depth and high production values... can we build similar games primarily for the education market?  That is the $64,000 question.

- Hap Aziz

We're witnessing a convergence in the word of photography and videography, and it's an unusual one if you consider the history of the technology.  For years, digital video cameras offered the capability to shoot still pictures, while digital still cameras often allowed the photographer to capture short video clips.  For a variety of technical reasons neither cross-over solution was particularly impressive.  If you wanted to shoot good video, you used a camera built primarily for video, and if you wanted still shots, a DSLR was the typical choice.

This article at Wired.com gives a bang-up description of the technological convergence taking place, and it is fascinating reading.  The short story is that with new cameras hitting the market, such as the Canon 5D Mark II, the world of digital still and video photography is being turned on its head.  Imagine a 21 megapixel DSLR that shoots full-frame while using the amazing Canon L-series glass.  Now imagine that same camera shooting full 1080p video with a pricetag of about $2300, without the lenses.  That dual-purpose capability at that price point is simply amazing!

We are witnessing the beginning of a fundamental shift in our visual image-capturing paradigm.  And I think I've just figured out what I want for this Christmas.

- Hap Aziz

The Internet is truly an amazing repository of information.  In a previous post I mentioned Vannevar Bush's "memex" device, and it is clear that the Internet, specifically with its World Wide Web interface fills that role in grand fashion, well beyond his most optimistic imaginings, I'm sure.  Today's reminder of the power, reach, and memory of the Internet comes from an email out of the blue to my official Rasmussen address.

Many years ago, perhaps six or seven, I worked at Valencia Community College here in Orlando as their Director of Internet and Instructional Technologies.  While I was there, I created a "Rubric for Assessing Participation in Online Discussion Forums" based on the college's core competencies of Think, Value, Communicate, and Act.  Fast forward to the present.  A professor at a college in Pennsylvania looking for a rubric for students engaged in the online portion of their class came across the one I had authored.  By simply searching the web, this professor was able to locate me to ask permission to use the rubric--and I of course gave it.  (By the way, if anyone else sees the rubric and wishes to use it, you have my permission.  I only ask that I am credited with authorship and that you let me know if it proves useful to you.)

There are several interesting aspects to this episode, but one of the most interesting ideas to me is the fact that so much of what we create electronically now ends up as part of such a thorough system of record keeping, in the form of the Internet.  Just a handful of years ago, not many people would have been able to predict the far ranging consequences of the Internet in the area of "obscure record keeping."  Looking into the future, we see some tremendous opportunity for data mining search engines.  But even now, it's fun to see what "the world" knows about us.  Go ahead:  Google yourself and find out.

- Hap Aziz

Back in 1945, a gentleman by the name of Vannevar Bush (an MIT faculty member and a science advisor to Franklin Roosevelt during World War II) pondered the nature of his research: he observed that he spent much of his time just looking up what other people were doing in his field before he even got to the point where he could start making meaningful contributions to the field.  As a solution to this problem, Bush proposed a device which he called "memex" (for memory extender) that would be able to store the sum total of human knowledge, and if one had a question on any subject, one only needed to consult this device.  Look at his description of the memex, and keep in mind that he came up with this idea in 1945, before computers with keyboards and display screens where even on anyone's drawing board:

"A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

"It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

"In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely"

There's more to the description; in fact, he published his thoughts in an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled "As We May Think" in July, 1945.  A very interesting read.

A footnote to all this is that Vannevar Bush is widely credited as being the conceptual inventor of the Internet--that's what the memex really is, after all.  The irony is that when there was talk in the 2000 presidential election that Gore "invented" the Internet, Bush could very truthfully claimed that it was a Bush that really started it all.  :)

- Hap Aziz

• the original IBM PC - this machine came with a whopping 16kb of RAM, a single sided floppy drive with a 160kb storage capacity, and a green monochrome monitor. The CPU ran at a blistering 4.77 MHz speed. The total cost to me, monitor included, was about $2700 in 1981.
• Yamaha CD R/W drive - this was a tool necessary for my game company to burn master disks for reproduction. The drive had a 4x read speed and a blazing 2x write speed, and I got the drive for the bargain basement price of $3,000 in 1995. By the way, each recordable disk was a gold master, and they ran $10 apiece.
  
• Hewlett Packard fax machine - in 1988, the communications consulting partnership I had needed to receive and send documents by fax. We considered leasing a machine, but we decided to make a purchase for the long-term instead, picking up the machine for a cool $2800.
• 10 Mb hard drive - when it came time to upgrade my IBM PC, I found a great deal on a hard drive. 10 Mb of storage space (I'd never fill that up!), and only about 5 pounds. I got it cheap at $600. (Yes, that was 10 Megabytes of storage space.)
• NEC 3D Multisync monitor - Sometime in the early '90s (though I can't recall the exact date), I was so thrilled to get this $700 video monitor. It gave me an incredible 1024 x 768 interlaced resolution on a whopping 14" CRT. (Today I just ordered a 24" LCD monitor capable of a full 1920 x 1200 resolution for $269.)
• Online BBS service - before the ubiquitous Internet and World Wide Web, I paid an hourly rate of $12.95 for my blazing 1200 baud connection. Ah, the good old days of getting a $400 montly bill to get an online text service.

April 29, 1964:  Godzilla battles Mothra for the first time.

- Hap Aziz

This past Saturday I attended the MegaCon Science Fiction and Fantasy convention in Orlando, Florida.  It was held at the Orange County Convention Center, which was a great venue for it, considering the number of exhibitors attending as well as the amazing crowd that was packing the place.  The convention is a three day affair (from March 7 through March 9) featuring a main exhibition hall as well as break-out rooms for sessions such as the Sci-Fi/Anime Game Show, How to Prepare a Good Portfolio for artists, an Independent Film Makers panel, and a number of costume contests spread over the three days.

Speaking of costumes, there were some amazing examples of reproduction detail as well as creativity on display.  There were, of course, the requisite Star Wars characters all over the convention with several intimidating Darth Vaders roaming the aisles.  The first picture* here is of me with the Master Chief from the Halo video game series.  Other characters were Indiana Jones (giving whip usage demonstrations), the entire Gotham City crime syndicate as well as Batman, more Storm Troopers than on an Imperial Battlecruiser, Morphius from the Matrix (it was fun to see him strike a pose with Master Chief), Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario and Luigi, quite a few of the Pokemon characters, and on and on.

One of the more enjoyable aspects for "older" folks like me is the opportunity to see the people who played characters out of our childhoods.  The second picture* here is of me with Mark Goddard, the person that played Major Don West, the pilot of the Jupiter 2 on Lost in Space.  That was probably my favorite show as a young boy (a bit young at the time to truly appreciate Star Trek), so it was a big thrill for me to shake his hand and get his autograph. 

An interesting characteristic of people that are big fans of Science Fiction and Fantasy is that these folks often find themselves taking an educational path and selecting a career that brings them as close to their imaginations' desires as possible.  (It's not at all difficult to find interviews with dozens of NASA engineers and technicians from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo eras who cited Robert Heinlein as a strong influence in bringing them to the space program.)  For students in computer-related programs, there is often a shared interest in truly imaginative fiction: time travel, robots, space travel, and alien encounters are common elements in our dreams and play, and they inevitably find their way into our daily work lives as well.  That's certainly how it worked for me, having started as a fan of Astro Boy in my early childhood and progression through TV shows such as Ultra Man to Battlestar Galactica, authors including Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov, and formats that included a healthy dose of comic books (you've got to check out the Iron Man movie trailer). 

The upshot of it all is that the inventions of our imaginations often become world-changing reality as we grow up.  All political rhetoric aside, that's the kind of change I'm most hopeful about.  Back in the 1970s there was a band named Klaatu (named after the alien character in the famous movie The Day the Earth Stood Still) that composed much of their music from a Science Fiction perspective.  This is from the song "Hope" off their second album of the same title:

Hope is like a lighthouse keeper's beam.
Hope - the master cobbler of our dreams.
For Hope believes in desert streams.
The mightiest of stars,
the microcosm in a jar -
vast or small they all revolve on Hope

Spanning the mightiest of stars down to the microcosm in a jar is the reach of our imaginations.  And tying it all together is hope for what the future may bring.

*Yes, I am wearing a Tick t-shirt from the original cartoon series.  Spoon!

- Hap Aziz

I admit that I still feel like a little kid on Christmas morning.  Only at this point in my life, the gifts I hope for are quite a bit more sophisticated.  I'd love to hear what you receive this holiday season as part of your family traditions.

Digital cameras?  Computers?  Cell phones?  Robots?  There are so many wonderful gadgets on the market!

As for me, I've hinted to my wife that an iPod Touch looks especially sweet....

- Hap Aziz

This past Saturday I attended a birthday party held at the DisneyQuest “indoor interactive theme park” in Orlando, Florida.  Essentially, this interactive theme park is a mega-game arcade filling several floors with classic video games, pinball machines and air hockey tables, and a wide range of virtual reality simulations and multi-sensory video environments that place the game player in roller coasters, river raft rides, pirate ship battles, and many other imaginative settings.

The funny thing is that I repeatedly felt drawn back to the classic arcade games from my youth: Centipede, PacMan, Joust, Frogger, and—one of my all time favorites—Zaxxon (that’s me getting tons of freeplay).  The question of why so many people keep returning to the older video games has always fascinated me.  Sure, there’s the element of nostalgia for these classics, but the phenomenon is much more than that (especially for the kids that weren’t even born when these machines were all the rage).  The idea that game play is more important than graphics is almost heretical in this age of super-computing videogame systems.  Yet, that’s what seems to be at the heart of the matter: A game with superior game play will invariably capture a person’s imagination and keep it for a much longer period of time.  Read here, here, and here for some more in-depth discussion on the topic.

For game players this creates an interesting dilemma regarding where to spend your money and your time: on the visual masterpiece or on the satisfying blend of challenge versus playability?  The same dilemma holds true for game designers: where should they spend their finite development resources?  My personal preference is in playing games that are easy to get into (little to no learning curve) and play to some form of completion in a very short period of time.  In creating games, I tend to enjoy the process of creating logical puzzles—not necessarily abstract, but that can be woven into the fabric of a game story, for example.

Overall, I think we are seeing a wide range of games the spans one end of the visuals/gameplay spectrum to the other.  And that’s a good thing, as the market for this type of entertainment is tremendously large and continuously growing.  Perhaps nearly as much fun for me as playing those old arcade classics at DisneyQuest was watching what all the different game players chose to try.  My little six year old daughter loves her Wii and Playstation and PC for playing games at home (She’ll find a Wii version of the Ben 10 video game under the tree Christmas morning.) 

But at DisneyQuest she was all about air hockey and ski ball. 

And playing with me.

- Hap Aziz