Samrat Sharma

Choices and Influences

About a year ago, Janet Murray and grad student Chaim Gingold initiated a “game morphology” project at Georgia Tech. They asked several game designers and researchers, What ten games have been most important to you as a designer/reseracher, and/or most important to the development of electronic gaming in general?

Some initial results of the project made public on their website. Makes for an interesting read.

Also, I ended up watching Saving Private Ryan for the umpteenth time last night, and missed Meet Joe Black. Something tells me I made the right choice.

The Seventh Day

“The magic of a computer lies in its ability to become almost anything you can imagine, as long as you can explain exactly what that is. The hitch is in explaining what you want. With the right programming, a computer can become a theater, a musical instrument, a reference book, a chess opponent. No other entity in the world except a human brain has such an adaptable, universal nature. Ultimately all these functions are implemented by the Boolean logic blocks and finite-state machine described in the previous chapter….”

Daniel Hillis, “The Pattern on the Stone” 1998, p 39.

Danile Hillis is a computer scientist and the head of Disney’s Imagineering. What he has theorized here is the fact that science and what a man can do with it is limited to his imagination. The malleable property of computers shines through this piece of prose and reflects a very important thought: Everything you use on a computer has been inherited as a fundamental property of computers. Everything is crafted out of the material of raw ideas. And unlike most media, electronic entertainment remains an abstract form of ideas. Just as computers remain the sum total of your ideas, so do videogames. The experience that you derive from them is limited to your imagination.

So Big Things

Oh joyous day!! I’m so happy!! Apparently quite a few people have decided to send me wicked screensavers, many more have approved me, still more want to discuss that movie with me, and a lot more are asking for my details! YAY!

While I answer all this wonderful email, please visit this place. It’s fun. Really.

Armageddon

WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE!!!

Virtual Stimuli

Videogames are a form of human expression. There are people who insist it is art. Others rebuff that idea and call it entertainment. “Art” is merely what happens when you start to apply entertainment and the experiences thereof to your own life. That is to say: if videogames don’t say anything to you, that’s your own fault for not listening. It’s the same as with anything in life, including books, comics, and movies. I deny outright the notion that playing videogames is inert creatively. It’s not the same as doing nothing at all. People listen to music, read books to help them get in a relaxed frame of mind, and continue the creative flow on to their work. Art forms, and the experiences they offer are a known augmenter to the creative process. Similarly, I experience art forms to entertain myself and I utilize the settings and scenarios to enhance my own creative process, outputting a huge volume of supplementary data for each character, activity, and context. I think that videogames are an excellent tool for this purpose.