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Where are the 'Construction Set' Games?
"I know that most PC games today have editors where a player can create their own levels and share them but users still need the original software. Even worse, consoles, which have the larger market, don't have enough storage (except maybe for the XBox) and aren't open enough to encourage players to create their own games and share them."
C :I think I see mbishop's point. Legos are still alive and well, but I don't see as much evidence on these types of toys in today's TV commercials. It seems those commercials are more interested in pushing the latest licensed crap instead of pushing toys designed to stimulate your child's own imagination. Of course, a simple Google search may yield a result or two, but that still doesn't answer the real question. Computer-based sets, would be a nice alternative, but nothing beats the real thing where children can use their own hands to create something they can show their paernts. Where have all of the Heathkit's, the chemical experiment toys and the other types of "builder" sets gone, and are they due for a revival, soon?
In many ways, I think that the mod community is a more grown-up version of kids using these types of games to build their own creations.
The kids still have 'em. They just call 'em meth labs nowadays.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
http://leocad.org/
It was a real joy to see I could build with all the lego pieces my mother always threw away when I was a child because they weren't recognizable as legos.
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While there aren't any Music Construction Sets around, and I personally wish there were, there is a definite abundance of Game construction sets and there have been for years. A large community of homebrew game developers has sprung up around various programs from companies like ASCII and Clickteam, and there are dozens if not hundreds of freeware game construction sets that people use to make their own arcade games and RPG's. Programs like Acid from Sonic Foundry also fill a niche in the music industry by allowing people to start creating music without formal music instruction or lots of resources.
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worlds in ZZT and have great fun. The script editor was kinda klunky, but once you got used to it, it was really powerful
Of course, once you learned how to edit the levels, and you got the unlocker that could unlock the shipped levels, beating the game was pretty easy ;)
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
...they should be easier to make with the more recent use of middleware in the games industry. I mean, that is what a "construction set" is really - a very high level middleware.
The closest today is the simulator games you get on sourceforge that allow you to program robots.
http://www.stagecast.com/
No, there is absolutely no replacement for hands on building. To put something together on the computer would not be anywhere near the experience you get from building an "igloo" out of Construx around yourself and screaming for your mom to come lift it off you w/o breaking it (heeh).
;-)
How about spending hours playing w/roller coaster kits and watching the roller coaster fall upside down time after time because it was just about impossible to make it do a loop.
I used to love building forts, using construx, etc. I was never a fan of Legos (parts were too small?) nor was I a fan of any "computer level builders". Roller Coaster Tycoon lasted about 3 days in my house as a college student. Even w/all the cheats it wasn't fun.
We need to bring back hands on experience. Computers rot your brain
Well, I miss the old construction games (albeit you can still find a few music construction ones on www.shockwave.com and a few other shocked sites.) I also miss the old adventure games where you really had to think and use logic to proceed. Unlike most of the modern games where you can fight and use other methods to continue on. The old King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, etc. series were great little games for encouraging creative thought.
I remember how frustrated I used to get when I would get caught trying to figure out how to complete that one last task. I miss those games, unfortunately a few bad apples killed the genre (KQ7or8 anyone). Perhaps some new gaming company will decide to revive it, and perhaps even make it better so you can have different endings, different ways to win and lose, a less linear lifeline, but still all of those great little realistic and funny puzzles.
I loved the nursery rhyme and folk story puzzles in King's Quest, and the great space jokes in Space Quest.
But, these build it yourself games I have found still exist online in a lot of shockwave sites, like www.shockwave.com. Just no one has bothered making a large scale version... yet.
~ kjrose
Yeah Baby!
My Atari 400 KICKED ASS.
What was his name? Bill Budge? Now that was a cool creation.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Mail order monsters rocked by 8-bit world.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Contains an 3-D RPG Engine with toolset to create your own campaigns. Supports it's own C/C++ like scripting language, and includes a good integrated environment for developing maps, Non-Player Characters, and source code changed.
So go get creative...
a lot of these toys have forcefully deprecated because one idiot kid did something stupid with them and their parents had a fit.
This brings to light a bigger problem:
What ever happened to natural selection? You know, the kid who swallows too many marbles doesn't grow up to have kids of his own?
Why are parents now making kids wear a helmet for everything but jerking off? All of the fun toys had "swallowable parts" so they aren't popular anymore because some parent raised a stink over it...
*steps off soap box*
Yes, this article is without merit. There are plenty of construction sets, they exist within games. Neverwinter Nights and Morrowinds are AWESOME in their capabilities to make adventures. Quake III also comes to mind-- yes, modmaking requires programming, but map making doesn't.
The reason they don't make any "stand alone construction sets" anymore? Well, for one, the name "___ Construction Set" just isn't cool enough for mainstream consumer. But the biggest reason is money. If you can make a standalone NWN game, the people you distribute it to don't have to buy the original game. Game companies don't want that. They're in business to make money.
The Incredible Machine, More of The Icredible Machine, and Sid and Al's Crazy Toons (I may be wrong on this exact title) were all about constructing Rube Goldberg machines that were pretty neat, had multiple solutions, and allowed you to mess with gravity, friction, and the like to understand fundamental priniciples of physics while still having a good time sitting at a computer.
I think the "Construction Set" aspect still exists in many games, but it's taken new form. With the rise of First Person shooters and RTS as the more popular forms of entertainment, I think that sort of thing has moved into customizing the game. It takes quite a bit of talent to build really good levels, or brand new campaigns, and also quite a bit of devotion.
I see your problem though. Those sorts of activities are very much confined to the geek. Level design and game mods take quite a bit of computer expertise, and I get the feeling you were thinking along different lines. Games like The Incredible Machine come to mind. I'd be hard pressed to give you references, but one "Construction Set" games comes to mind. If you're interested in the game of pinball, I recommend Visual Pinball. It's a complete pinball game construction program, and it works beautifully. Much to the dismay of most of the Slashdot crowd, though, it's main drive is VBScript. Very fun and easy to use, however. The programming is basic enough that I think a beginner could learn to use it very easily.
Other than that, there's lots of software out there for music creation and whatnot. It may not be presented in game form, but if you have an itch to do it, I'm sure those would serve just as well!
> ... commercials are more interested in pushing the latest licensed crap ...
.. high replay value, no need to go back to the store for a few years?
.. now he talks more!)
Which one is more profitable?
A license agnostic computer game where the value is in the interactivity
Or the uber-franchisable, horizontal-marketing-up-the-ying-yang licensed toy that does so little, you're practically forced into buying the next toy, which does a tiny bit more (now you can move his head! now you can move his foot! now he talks! buy this
This is so obvious, its probably taught verbatim in business or marketing schools.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Altough the title of that application (Windows-based of course) sounded a bit strange, it's a solid application to create (but not limited to) RPG games. There are also some nice games. I'm now thinking about pulling my old (cancelled) Phantasy Star V project out of my shoes and looking for some guys who help me. When I started the project back in 1997, I cancelled it half a year later since nobody really wanted to contribute.
Every problem has a solution, but every solution creates new problems.
It's Racing Destruction Set. After I posted, I went hunting really fast and found this. I can see many hours of my time already gone now...
GOBACK.
I don't recall that Music Construction Set could make stand-alone music executables. Maybe I've got it wrong.
;^)
The other biggie, Adventure Construction Set, I believe also required an original disk to play.
Not that these were hard to come by. I owned originals of both, but they were trivial to copy and distribute, i.e. pirate.
The exception that I'm aware of is Garry Kitchen's Gamemaker (by one of the Kitchen brothers of Activision fame). This could be used to create stand-alone games and it was really a pretty freaking intricate design system that they came up with. It had scripting, sprite editing, background design, music design, and sound effects. Out of the box, you could create a fully functional reproduction of Pitfall! and use that as a basis to learn the system. Amazing stuff for the time.
Incidentally, all of the above is based on my recollection of the C=64 world. Other platforms may have had different limitations, but I recall ACS and Gamemaker as both being C=64 only. Perhaps I'm forgetting details in my old age.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
ROBO CODE
You can learn java, and you can beat the crap out of some IBM engineer at the same time! What more do you need?!
The best thing I could think of was Hypercard for the Macintosh, it allowed games like The Manhole to be created with very little programming. Sure, it needed a significant amount of computer knowledge to create something enteretaining, but it was nothing like programming a game like Quake III in C.
My all-time favorite game construction kit was the Pinball Construction Kit. It came out in 1985, and it allowed for the creation of personalized pinball tables inside the game. The only problem is that the game required to play any pinball table you design.
Try searching google for game creation kit. It came up with a ton of results, and this one looks promising.
The future isn't what it used to be.
I am happy to say that my little sister is four and she plays with legos. She is mostly into building cars so they roll the fastest across the floor in my dad's kitchen, but like I said, she's four. I think that proof that this has stimulated her creatively because the other day she was telling me that she had designed and then her mom had helped her cut out all of these pieces to put together to make a 3D basket. It's just a basket, I know. But it seemed amazing to me that a kid so young was designing things in 2D to be put together in 3D.
I can only hope that there are still toys like that available when I have my own kids. I don't have my legos anymore (my mom sold them when I was away for a summer), but maybe I can convince her to keep hers so that the next generation has all of those neat little pieces that always seem so scarce when you really need them... like the ones that transfer the block stack from up/down to right/left. And the pulleys. Must have pulleys.
Liora
You can still find and play the old adventure games; there even seem to be ports to the Palm. By the same token, you can still write your own versions. See Inform.
Thinking in terms of Music Construction Set...SimTunes was a great, if somewhat obscure game. Maxis rebranded version of "Musical Bugs" by Japanese artist Toshio Iwai. (demo here?). The idea was you had a big blank grid, that you could paint with colored blocks. 4 "bugs" would walk over the grid, and when they passed a color would play the pitch (or percussionish noise, if that was the type of voice you set the bug to) corresponding to that color. Other blocks would warp or otherwise redirect the bugs. You could focus on making a cool picture, a cool sound (it really could be used as a 'poor man's sequencer') or both. Very powerful, with "kiddy" and "advanced" (but still pretty friendly) interface settings.
They released this 5 or 6 years ago, recently rereleased in a pack of Kid-oriented Sim games. The original was fairly cranky in its need for certain DirectX drivers (windows of course), I bought the rerelease but haven't yet installed it to see if they improved the driver situation.
A great creative musical toy...maybe better for kids/teens/adults with a smattering of musical experience. (They have some cool music theory embedded in there, like you can constrain the notes to the blues or other scale...)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
You can't get any cool chemicals in them today because of safety concerns. What is the point of a chemistry set if you can't take off your eyebrows?
All that aside, my favorite toy when I was young was my handed down set of wooden blocks. I had enough of them that I could build massive structures, and I learned enough of basic enginerring that they didn't colapse on me. I couldn't choke on them and as long as my mother kept half an eye on me while I was young I never got more than a small bruise from the colapses.
All of my children will have old fashioned block sets. Simple toys that don't force play in one direction are the best.
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
You could wire flippers, bumpers, everything with your own point system. PBCS would also let you 'paint' your selected parts any of 5± colors including 'erasing' the part. Using 'invisible' bumpers was quite entertaining.
It was also possible to adjust gravity, bounce, and friction of the ball, IIRC.
The coolest feature of all is that you could take your finished game and 'compile' it to run stand-alone! Trading pinball games was great...ah, Apple 2 memories....I also had a program for the Apple 2 called Gamemaker. It let you create simple games like 2600 Pitfall clones and the like. Never got the hang of it....
The best 'Constructon Set' in recent memory was the level editor in Crack Dot Com's sidescroller, 'Abuse'. It used a lisp driven engine to allow you to make levels easier than anything I recall at the time. Just like wiring a simple circuit. (Much like PBCS!)
What's Bill Budge doing these days?
These days it seems like LEGO has become little more than a lame re-working of Playmobil, with barely a nod given to the idea that these things are meant to be built, not just looked at. They seem to be more interested in competing with action figures and other more "mainstream" toys than in making products like the LEGO I used to know -- Mindstorms being perhaps the only exception. I'm the first to admit that if I had Star Wars LEGO when I was a kid, I never would have left the house. These days, though, I just see more corporate branding tie-ins from a company that markets products to kids. This doesn't seem like the LEGO I grew up with.
Breakfast served all day!
Another thing that has been lost is that computers no longer boot into BASIC...ok, stop laughing, I'm a little bit serious here. Home computers booting into BASIC, plus hobbyist magazines (some oriented at kids) I think were a great boon to budding programmers/designers in the early 1980s. While the Web has a huge host of new opportunites, it doesn't provide the ramp up the learning curve that BASIC did...it's relatively tough to make a decent graphical game with javascript/DHTML, and other languages are even more obscure for the total newbie.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Mod Archive offers software to create MOD/S3M/etc type formats, and although I haven't explored the site very far, I would presume also provides large quantities of samples (at least they can be ripped from songs that are there) with which to make one's own music.
Yes, it's a weeee bit more complex than the old MCS was, but we're not in the world of the Commodore 64 anymore.
You can do some pretty darned cool stuff with good tracking software and samples.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Then there's Sid Meyer's SimGolf. You can build a (non-mini) golf course, and watch the Sims play on it, but you can also play the course with your in-game avatar golf-pro. Others can save their courses and there's a big course repository including real world courses at the official site, much less other non-official ones. The golf game is not like links, but it can be somewhat challenging and makes this an interesting mix of sim and sport.
Of course, prior to SimGolf there was the Sims. Build a family and a home, and then play with them. While currently you can't easily transfer families to other people, the online version due out soon is expected to be a huge seller, allowing people to pit their constructed families against others.
Another example, outside of PC gaming, is the PS2 game Frequency. It's similar in nature to DDR, save that you only use the shoulder or right pad buttons to hit notes as they pass, but one of the features is a remix mode, where you can take any of the ingame tech/industrial/electronica songs and play around with their arrangements to some extent. Once you've created a new remix, you can save it, and by swapping cards, allow another player to attempt your new track. The same can be said for many of the eXtreme sports games (THPS3, etc) that allow you to create a skate-type park that you can save and let others play on.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Feh. I used to DREAM about playing with dirt. The only toy we had as children was a tick and flea infested, rabid racoon. Playing involved trying to run away from it while it tried to scratch your eyes out AND WE LOVED IT!!!!11!!1!
Michael Loves Me!
Er... why do you feel you need to be 12 to play with Lego? There's no point in being grown up if you can't still act like a kid every once in a while.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The MTV Music Generator series seemed to fit the bill for a music construction kit. As an added bonus, it was released for the PSX and PC, and the sequel was released for the PS2.
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[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
What happened to games like The Incredible Machine or Lemmings? I remember not being able to remember many long hours spent enthralled by those two puzzle games specifically.
Not only were they good puzzle games but they were fun too. I've played quite a few edutainment games that were more painfull than fun but what happened to the fun puzzle games. Is this a lost art?
It's amazing how spiritual an elaborated beer commercial can be. -- Philip K. Dick
Yea, kids need to get out more and play real baseball and get hit in the head a few times. This teaches physics lessons (Newton's third law) better than any simulation can.
C'mon MAN MOD me up. or NOT, oh well....sigh
Of course, I maintain that given time... really cool stuff will start to surface. If the EULA hasn't stifled people's creativity and willingness to develop in that environment.
Although not a game, for many painting or another form of art can be just as fun as a game but, more importantly, it can stimulate the mind very well. I believe it meets the criteria, you can save it, no programming required, it can be very hands on, it stimulates the mind, you don't need the original software to view it should you use a computer.
For the builders at heart, check out MindRover by CogniToy. Given a set of parts, you build a little robotic vehicle to compete in various sporting and dueling activities. At the core of the game is modern AI and robotics theory, layered with some idealized virtual hardware to smooth over the "unfun" aspects of building a real robot. It's tons of fun to have competitions with your friends' robots!
1) lego mind-storm (no-brainer)
2) electronic experiment kit (radio-shack)
3) in Fry's electronics -- i found a fuel-cell experiment model car kit, pretty cool stuff.
4) any RC car will have you tinkering for hours
5) build your own kite / balsa airplane together
i mean... sadly enough -- people look for toys nowadays to keep the child busy, and the "nicer" parents try to find toys that keep the child busy while "stimulates their mind". i am sorry, but the best way to stimulate their mind is to *SPEND TIME WITH YOUR KID*! if you are willing to give some effort to spending time with them, then anything around you can become a mind-stimulating adventure; gardens are eco-systems full of knowledge to be discovered. a swing at the playground has many physics wonders. salt chrystalizing on the beach is a marvel of chemistry.
with all due respect -- trying to find toys to keep kids busy vs. finding mindless TV shows to babysit your offspring rates about the same level in my book -- toys that are stimulating or otherwise.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I'm sorry, but if you think NWN is one of the most bug-ridden games to come out lately, you haven't been paying many games. You're right, though, that it does have quite a few problems. We had a number of players not get saved at all last night in our weekly multi-player session.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
Ok maybe I've been in a cave for a while, but when I was a mere child I *loved* my legos and enjoyed constructing various projects, but nowadays it seems that most lego products come in these specialized kits (ie Star Wars, Dinosaurs, Pirate stuff, etc), and if you visit the Lego webstore you can't even get a simple kit of legos, I'm talking nothing but plain old blocks and basic parts...and the only way to get these are buy buying them individually,....and same goes with stores, on a whim I visited Toys R Us and same deal, no kit with JUST basic blocks.......whats going on?!
I learned to program way back in third grade with apple basic and logowriter. Basic is gone, unless you can find an old Apple II lying around, but logowriter still exists
I never played computer games when I was a kid. The few computers that existed back in the 40s and 50s were reserved for governments and major corporations. :-) The only toys I had were things like Erector Sets (Meccano in Europe), electric trains, chemistry sets, games, toy guns, etc.
Children's play seems much more organized today -- with a concomitant loss of freedom for children. Play dates, T ball, organized sports even for small children. Some time ago in the Washington Post magazine I read an account by a mother who had taken a half time job in order to spend more time with her kids. I felt sorry for everyone -- their schedules basically precluded free time, the chance to explore on one's own, etc.
I don't necessarily blame computer games -- the games in many ways reflect our current society. My recreational computer use reflects my life -- some art, some facilitation of my athletic, social and political endeavors. Others' use of computers I expect reflects their lives. But still, I consider these developments to be less than healthy for our society and for us as individuals.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
I have a 12 year old brother who loves messing around with the level editor this comes with.
He made a "pokey the penguin" (www.yellow5.com) level.
He basically made a large map divided by a large stream with a bridge in the middle.
On one side was a race of penguins that only say "Yes!" and their king is named Pokey, who asks you to retreive the Arctic Circle Candy stolen by the italians.
Across the drawbridge of course is a bunch of stereotypical italians named tony, guido, etc and they all say things like "That's a-one spicy meat-a-ball"... Anyway, after confronting the italian king about the arctic circle candy he attacks you, and once you kill him you can pillage the arctic circle candy off of his corpse.
Once you return the arctic cirlce candy to pokey, he rewards you with "The Biff Guantlet" then it ends.
I was amused to say the least. I wish I had something like this instead of legos when I was 12.
I believe you're asking about Worlcraft.
Back in the day, though, I spent so much time with the Pinball Construction Set I grew flippers.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Like Hollywood, the industry has found a formula and an accompanying demographic that translates into optimum profit when marketed correctly, and they will "sing that note" until it stops making them money.
BTW, I remember a great little game for the 6502-based PC's (C-64, Atari 800, etc.) called "Racing Car Destruction Set"--what a blast!
--
"I'm don't know exactly what an AS/400 is, but I'm pretty certain I wouldn't want one up my ass" --Lou
The real reason toys with replayability arnt as available anymore should be freakin obvious - they dont make as much money.
Gotta keep you comin back to the store for more. It's as simple as that. Overzealous litigation-happy parents have absolutely nothing to do with it. They are a drop in the bucket of the toy market.
And for the helmet, I wear one when biking/blading. I'll make my kids wear one. You'd probably have a different opinion had you ever been hit by a car. You'd also do well to consider that given the increase in car traffic over the last 10 years (nevermind the fact that while I might have been able to survive getting slammed by a pony, any SUV would take me out these days), the roads have become *considerably* more dangerous than they used to be.
But go on, blame parents for trying to *maintain* their kids' safe environment while the roads become more and more dangerous.
"Old man yells at systemd"
true to the Lego legacy (legocy?) they still show alternate conformations on the box. I bought the "Luke, Vader, and the Emperor" small set as a decoration for my desk at home and it showed several other things you could make with the bricks.
I think your criticism of Lego may be slightly unfounded. Looking at the "themes" drop down at lego.com I see 2 out of 20 themes that are licensed (Harry Potter and Star Wars) the rest, while they may be inspired by movies (e.g. the Dinosaurs theme or Jack Stone) all seem to carry on the Lego tradition of giving you sets and letting you build whatever you want. The store also lets you buy whatever bricks you want in whatever color.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
Don't forget Pontifex by Chronic Logic.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
If you're in Waltham, Mass and in the mood for real hands-on construction toys be sure to check out The Construction Site, the only toy store I know dedicated to such things. Who knows, they might even have software, I didn't look.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
RPG Maker for PS and PS2
The original has been out for a while. It's similar to Adventure Construction Set.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
I loved Pinball Construction Kit. Something about it, however, struck me as disturbing some years later...in the early '90's, I ran a small computer lab at a non-profit kid's organization. The kids (around 5-12 years of age) would come in for their computer time, race for a copy of Pinball Construction Kit, and then proceed to build a simple machine--just a pinball surrounded by bumpers. So, in effect, there was no way for this ball to escape the surrounding bumpers, and it would just continually bounce around and rack up points. No hole, no flippers, nothing else. Then they would activate the pinball machine and watch the score crank up for the next 30 mintues or so, until their turn at the computer was over. When I'd ask the kids if maybe they might like to build a machine with a real challenge (you know, one that actually had flippers and perhaps a hole so you might actually lose the occaisional ball), they would almost universally respond by looking at me as if I was crazy, and say, "No way. Look at all the points I'm getting this way. I'm winning."
To this day, I shake my head over this.
Back in the golden age of Construction set games - the 80s (I remember fondly The Quill, The Graphic Adventure Creator, HURG and The Shoot-em-up Construction Set) computer users were a different breed. Most people who bought computers first started doing funny things like "Learning BASIC" and programming the computer. That's how computers worked - and why you bought them, they were a hobbyist activity. So it's not surprising that the sort of computer owner who dabbles in BASIC (but is not a hardcore programmer) would like these sorts of creative games.
These days computers are pretty much an appliance like a fridge or TV to most people. Email arrives, they look at porn by clicking an icon, they accept whatever Mr Gates feeds them. It's not surprising that the creative aspect of gaming has all but been lost.
Recent exceptions to this rule I can remember is "RPG Maker" for the Playstation - and I think there's a sequel coming for the PS2. Neverwinter Nights also has a nice campaign builder utility.
capsula
Well, there's Advent, which is an open-source adventure game construction kit.
Sounds like Capsela to me.
Simply put, kids are brought up in a fast track environment. Our culture as a whole craves instant gratification, which is something you can't get from a construction set. Kids can still create and invent, but the elements are much more structured now.
Lots of posts talk about LEGOs- complaints of the "juniorization" or dumbing-down of kits are commonplace in the LEGO building community. In the "good old days", a basic set of blocks was plenty, and your imagination was the tool for buidling. Now the tool is the instructions that come with the kit. How many children do you see play with the elements of the set in their own way, and not the stock finished product?
Programming logo or basic was offered in most schools I have attended on euro-asian continent, nevermind speed of the machines. Programming can be like lego or other, if simple enough blocks are used. Main thing is to teach students a self reward system, for programming. Get stuff done,
fast enough that it will bring gratification for cool things, like moving turtle across the screen.
Anyway that trend, lack of those games etc, can be seen on different areas, schooling, daily entertainment. Everything is being wired closer to reaction level, advertisement, movies. Not to logical level...
just my 2c.
"Attack modifiers are messed up and randomly change between saves, etc .. It shouldn't have been release with such glaring bugs."
:-)
That's only a display bug. If you read the actual calculations it does at the bottom, everything is fine.
But sure, it's a bug and a bug is always a bug.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...is breaking them. Young kids won't find as much enjoyment with computerized construction toys as they will their real-life counterparts for a few reasons, but the primary reason is the inability to break them. I remember the sick joy I got from breaking my Lego creations and smashing my Lincoln Log houses like I was Godzilla.
Maybe I'm just sick. Who knows...but man loves to destroy. It gives us a sense of control. Until we can tap all that sick perverted pleasure with a computer program, even I won't be making anything in the imaginary world of 1's and 0's. I like to see plastic fly, woodchips soar, and smell the spoils of my personal, private wars.
Give me a magnifying glass, some army men, Lego's, and some beer and I'll have a jolly good time!
-= Jigoku =-
I stumbled across a Bridge building game a few years ago. Pontifex! (you can grab the demo at the site. It is a great game that lets you construct a bridge by using light weight material/ heavy weight material/ cable/ and decks. while having to stay within a simple materials budget. Each type of constuction equipment had advantage and disadvantages (weight/strength/cost/ etc.)
The best part about this is that it is REALLY EASY to use and understand.
My 7 year old daughter plays with it, and it is not suprising to hear her make comments (I made a bride with the same kind of triangles) or hear her ask questions about a bridge ( Why isn't this bridge too tall with the supports as wide as they are?).
This game is great. I reccomend it.
flogger
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
My favorite, although probably not up there with Legos or Lincoln Logs, would be the good old "Incredible Machines" series of PC games by Jeff Tunnell. A great mix of wacky puzzle games and classic construction-style building. It's got something in it for everyone, from the tediously easy beginner levels to the mind wobbling insanely complex expert levels, not to mention a built in editor to come up with your own puzzles. Maybe not a true "classic", but sure something to pass the hours away with (I still play it on a weekly basis ;).
Here is some guy that is attempting to rewrite it for the PC. I assume he means Windows.
Here is a review of the classic C64 version.
My brother and I spent many hours creating impossible track and then racing around them.
As an answer to the question of "Why are there no more construction set games?" I think that many of those games were somewhat limited in what you could do. I actually spend more time twiddling with games that I have written than playing other games.
Lasers Controlled Games!
This is the goddamn stupidest thing I have heard in weeks.
The first machines I used in school were Commodores and all of the software was set up to boot from floppy. There was a "command line," but we only used three of those commands:
LOAD *,8,1
LIST
RUN SUMMERGAMES
I have a more detailed OS experience at a cash machine.
My house had macintoshes since I was very young. I learned how to program using Pascal to program "Core Wars" bots on my Classic SE. I used to write reports in AppleWorks and my earliest online experience was a graphical CompuServe.
I didn't learn DOS until midway through high school...and didn't learn un*x until college. For years, the only commands i knew, the only commands I needed, were cd, ls, cat, pico, man and pine. Did I learn how to actually think, with all these GUIs doing shit for me and such a limited shell vocabulary? Well, I've an MA in Rhetorical Theory and a BS in Software Engineering, and they certainly didn't come in a bag of Doritos.
Any idiot can be taught to bang away commands at a shell, same as any idiot can be taught to click away at a screen. Intelligence comes from the ability to combine your banging or clicking into a useful string of actions that produces results. A shell command line may feel more elite and productive because it doesn't have any pretty picutres, but it's certainly not proof of intellect...CAD programs have been using GUIs forever and nobody claims that architects can't think.
However, to look at some of the perl code I've seen, I would make that assertation of certain sysadmins. One line simplicity, indeed. Until you try and debug it!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I noticed a fair number of problems, but nothing that prevented me from finishing the game.
The truly bizarre thing is that I didn't have big time path finding/AI issues until sometime in the third chapter. Maybe that's just when I noticed them. (FWIW, I played the entire sp campaign under version 1.19. 1.20 didn't come out until after I finished sp.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I found Robocode to be pretty boring, actually..
A more interesting game, IMHO was SSI's Omega.. you build the tanks in addition to simply programming them; (so there are trade-offs, where different weapons fire at different speeds, and do different damages.)
There's also much more depth, because the tanks have to find each other, instead of being placed in a simple 'arena'..
Mindstorms are very good at moving the Construction Set mentality into Logic and Code.. I think that it is a bummer that they are so expensive that every kid can't get a set.
I am also impressed with Rokenbok. This doesn't include programming and such, but it does combine technologies and push the limit of what is possible in children's minds...
Great toys are the ones that make children comfortable with the emerging technologies. The construction toys that we played with in our younger days are old news. Toys are not nearly as cool when your parents are better at using them than you are.. My favorite memories as a child was building a computer program, and having adults be totally astonded by what I made. Because Adults are more comfortable with current technology, toys are going to have to go somewhere where adults are not comfortable.
Computers really did not come of age until a generation of kids had been able to play with them. I think robotics and the like may come to age after this generation of kids play with Mindstorms and Rokenbok and the like.. I see games like Robowars becoming the new playground for the nerdy kids, and They will be doing things with Embedded software and robotics that blow the adult generation's mind
Was purchased by a company that eventually changed their name to "X10". Talk about a company that grew up to be a bunch of assholes.
If you want another Pinball Construction Set, talk to Bill Budge. He created the first computer sim construction set of any kind. I still have a few Apple binaries I created using his tool set. He has an interview here.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
My favorites (I had ACS and MCS) were Rocky's Boots and Robot Odyssey.
Those were fun games. :-)
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
DarkBasic is a programming language and dev environment that lets users with little or no programming experience create 3D games.
The great thing about DarkBasic is that it acts as a very good introduction to both programming and 3D programming (which can be a nightmare if starting with something like DirectX).
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Supposedly Will Harvey (author of Music Construction Set for the Apple ][) wrote this program when he was 16 years old, back in 1983ish. The liner notes said the he wrote it in one night on a dare from a high-school teacher.
Makes me think of Stuffit, DeCSS and Napster: other great software written by very young, very motivated hackers.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Here are two cool games that let you construct stuff:
www.bridgebuilder-game.com - construct your own bridges on a limited budget
www.sodaplay.com - build walkers in a springs and masses simulation
"Linux"? People can satisfy their creative and constructive urges using a huge multitude of programming and graphic tools. Of course, there area also an endless number of game editors for many games, games that now have free runtimes (Quake, etc.).
The game making kit M.U.G.E.N is available. If you've ever wanted to try your hand at making a Street Fighter II or King of the Fighters type game. The kit comes with a tiny demo game. (One character versus his evil clone.) A lot of people on the internet copy the art and moves from popular fighting games to make characters and levels.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
RDS was THE coolest game ever. The only thing that came close was Mail Order Monsters....
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
Anyone remember Racing Destruction Set on the C64? I remember sitting around for hours designing race tracks with my friends and then DESTROYING my friends cars. There is nothing that sparks creative interests like trashing your friend's on the computer!
The command would have been
LOAD "*",8,1
which meant load the first file on the disk - which usually also had an autorun. In fact, I still sometimes hit shift-2 to do quotation marks.
LOAD "$",8
Was the typical command to get the list of files on a disk. LIST displayed the currently entered BASIC file (as the normal shell doubled as a BASIC editor).
Great machine, that.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Welcome to the land of the defensive parent. I didn't note anything in the initial post that indicated that helmets on bike-riding kids was bad. He is right, however, in a sense. We are overprotecting our children, and look at the results...
I, too, make my kids wear helmets when riding a bike, rollerblading, and skateboarding. It's just good sense. I do not, however, sue every company that produces a toy that my children manage to cause themselves pain with. The point that you failed to see in the initial comment was simply that litigation has pulled MANY a good toy off the market, and will continue to do so. Attributing all toy cancellations to the greed of the corporation, no matter how good it feels is both cynical and inaccurate. Does greed factor in? Much of the time. Is it the only factor? Certainly not.
Now, before you leap back on your super-parent high-horse, try to remember that his opinion is no less worthy of being spoken than your own. Also remember than man is the only animal without a natural predator, the only animal that places more emphasis on the survival of the weakest than that of the strongest, and the only animal that the Darwin-esque "survival of the fittest" does not apply to. Something to mull over while you're congratulating yourself on your parenting prowess over your helmeted, marble-free children.
My usual fix for that particular obsession is the Citybuilder series from Impressions Games. Started with Caesar II, then moved up to Caesar III, Pharoah and the Cleopatra expansion, Zeus and the Poseidon expansion, and eagerly awaiting Emperor, set in ancient China.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The game let's you build not only personal levels for yourself and to share with friends, but also allows you to post your favorite personal levels into a TQ Universe where other members can play your games as well.
Additionally, TQworld has begun to open up the internal language (the forum on the TQworld site has this information beginning to appear). Since the games are stored on your hard drive in clear-text format, you can tweak them (or completely rewrite/design new ones) in your favorite editor.
My five-year-old, just learning to read, will probably be fluent in HTML [no frontpage, thank you] by the time she's in second grade. Basic web design, at first anyway, gave me the same feeling I used to get with the old Erector Set..."I made that." Scripting, IMO, is the ultimate construction set, allowing kids to mix and match ideas quickly and easily with lest risk of slicing fingers [a common Erector Set injury]. Then again, you risk carpol tunnel, and these kids would reather build viruses than space ships, anyway.
But the game industry is way too obsessed with getting just one more frame per second out of the voxel-mapper than in building something other than a clone.
This is the industry that asked "who's going to buy a game about doing the chores?" when the Sims was being pitched.... for three years.
Now, they can't churn out the sequels fast enough. (and the middle manager who asked that question probably got a bonus and a free vacation, PAID FOR by sales of the Sims).
Perhaps someone will develop and market such a game, but it is highly doubtful it will be the "game industry."
Chipwits, for the original Mac, allowed you to program a robot by hooking together various bits of code that sort of resembled ICs. A google search turned up a Chipwits web site, but it doesn't appear to have anything to say at this point.
Another was "The Incredible Machine", where you solved problems by putting together various components to build Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions. It appears that some version of this game is still in existence, see this page from Sierra
Now I may have to actually try the new IM.
Subscribers can see articles in the future? So what? Everyone gets to see them in the future.
Where does Bill have his games for downloads?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Go to the nearest toy store of decent size - not the Kay-Bee in the mall but like a Toys R Us, and check out the prices for toys. You'll easily find that Legos, Kenex (sp?), Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, TinkerToys, etc remain some of the more expensive objects, and it's not because they're hard to make or sell. It is because these toys spark imagination, incite creativity, and can be played with again & again ad nauseum and NEVER get old or fall out of fashion. Hell, in my teens I was goofing off with Legos I'd had since I was 8. Compared to the latest Power Ranger, that's value.
And that's also the crux of the whole issue. The toy companies exist to make money like any other industry, and the way they keep your kid continually wanting the latest-greatest is with advertising and the synthesis of "cool" around the latest toy. Every one of us felt that left-out feeling when they were the only kid who didn't have the toy of the moment (check South Park's "Chinpokomon" episode for a reminder). Hell, I still remember how excited I was when I got Optimus Prime for Christmas. Nobody else I knew had it, and for the next month I was the center of attention amongst my friends. Sure the toys are fun many times, but the kids get a thrill out of that attention just as you or I do when we bring in the latest tech gadget to work to the squeals of envy from fellow geeks.
Toy makers aren't stupid -- they know that licensed toys are a source of unending turnover and that with enough up-front marketing they can have your kid driving you insane for a $10 piece of crap over & over again each week from 5 to 12 years of age, and so this is what they do. There'll always be a new Care Bear of Stretch Armstrong or Barbie outfit. Not so with "construction set" games -- even the most adamant Lego fiend reaches an eventual point of saturation where they have all the blocks they need.
Well, maybe not Zack. He's a Lego maniac.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
- Ultimate Wizard (well, it "only" had a level editor, I guess, but man! so much fun...)
- Slot Car Construction Set (tile-based racetracks!)
- Racing Destruction Set
- GameMaker
- Adventure Construction Set
And I don't care how much you naysayers say "nay"; the spirit of these games lives on in NWN. NWN mods are not just PVP mods and crappy, unfinished story mods. There are tons of good modules available already, but you're better off playing them in small groups with people you know (just like "real" tabletop DnD).To the people complaining about too many "uber" twinked-out characters running around, I say: why are you playing on a server that allows them? Every time someone serves a game, there are two check boxes: "Enforce Legal Characters?" and "Item Level Restrictions?". If you don't want to be knee-deep in twinked-out munchkins, stay off the non-ELC, non-ILR servers! et voila.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Same for the Super Snapshot!
:)
In addition, the Super Snapshot let you cheat at Bingo in RabbitJack's Casino on QuantumLink.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Of course, one reason why this is true is that a person never has just one trait, but a collection of traits.
What's more, a change in environment can make a formerly adaptive trait purely detrimental. (Fair skinned people get skin cancer in sunny climes, dark skinned people get rickets in cold climes, sickle cell anemia has no adaptive benefit in an area where malaria doesn't florish.)
My favorite evolution story is the one about the Samurai Crabs. In this case, the adaptive trait (having shells that look like human faces) supposedly developed entirely because of a local superstition about such crabs. It had nothing to do with "fitness" in the sense laymen use it when referring to evolutionary theory. However, it was an adaptive trait (unless the theory is wrong and the crabs really are reincarnated samurai) because it allowed the face crabs to survive and reproduce.
The first thing I did with SEUCK was take that Ikari Warriors-type game, and turned into a gang-themed game. Instead of opposing soldiers, you had crips and bloods dukin' it out. Instead of a tank firing sideways, it became a cadillac doing a drive-by.
Ah the memories "OK SUCKA!"
Although not explicitly a game, programs such as Reason that have synthesizers and samplers of various sorts organized as rackmount synthesizers are as entertaining as any game, and are indeed used to make real music too. propellerheads.se. Just looking at the screenshots should be enough to get you hooked. For example, you can flip the synthesizers around and rewire them and every single knob is tweakable.
Also, Mac/MSP (only available for Mac) is a music program that has been likened to legos, for one puts together various tone generators and input devices to create complex digital synthesizers. For an analogous game, try Widget Workshop from Maxis.
For games, don't forget SimCity 4 and the rest of the Sim games, which are still being churned out at a good clip.
Cliff wrote: Computer-based sets, would be a nice alternative, but nothing beats the real thing where children can use their own hands to create something they can show their paernts.
I'd like to argue with that. Software is so much more flexible and maleable than things in the real world. You build a robot arm with LEGO Technics and it doesn't work what do you do? You have to pull it apart to fix a small bug. Then you get it working and you want to add a nice little new feature. What do you do? You pull it apart to enhance it. Software is magical in that you can change it without disassembly and reassembly.
To my way of thinking there are lots of great software based construction kits and many have been mentioned in this thread (e.g. Pinball Construction Kit, ClickTeam's Klik and Play, Incredible Machine, StageCast Creator, and SimTunes) but the ones mentioned are either not universal Turing Machines or are universal only in a theoretical sense (way too awkward to do some things). (Or are professional programming languages that are really not kid-friendly.)
What gets me excited are universal construction kits. Examples of this are Squeak (and its EToys), Agentsheets, Logo, Boxer, and my ToonTalk. These are all kid-friendly program development environments. Software-based special purpose construction kits are fine, but general-purpose ones give kids access to the true power and magic of computers.
And of course kids can "show their parents" software they have built. And the parents are likely to be more impressed than a LEGO construction.
While it's great to solve the puzzles to put the ball in the bucket, start the contraption, turn on the light, etc., I also ended up spending considerable time constructing "Loony Tunes" style contraptions that rolled the ball, triggering the fan that blew the balloon, that triggered the mouse trap that cut the string, that dropped the ball that hit the cat.
Great fun building stuff here.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
Yep, Fastload kicked ass. It's the first and last time I ever saw a firmware replacement (for the 1541's pathetic excuse for a firmware) sold as a separate product.
Uhm, who said anything about Commodore 64? The screenshots of these apps looked more like PC-CGA graphics to me. If they had been C64 screens they would have been much more colorful and generally nice looking. :)
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
OMG-far too fun and addictive! Replay value forever! I can't recommend them enough, and they'll fit on a floppy. Windows only tho... :(
I work at a public library and I have to catalog all of the non-book materials (CD-ROM's, videocassettes, DVD's, etc.) that we get. Among these I have to catalog a zillion children's CD-ROM's, which seem to be aimed at every grade level and every subject in existence, including reading, music, math, construction, etc. Admittedly, I think a lot of them are rather linear math quiz type things, but quite a few seem to have a creative element. My library has 153 children's CD-ROM titles which are all educational games, so listing them all here would be a boring exercise, but some titles include:
I never really look at the things in detail unless someone complains it's not working, but they are all very popular and are always getting checked out. They are geared towards a much younger age-group than NeverWinter Nights and Diablo (more my fare), but so was the Music Construction Set in it's day. I would imagine if someone gave me one of the creative games I used to play and a computer to run it on, it would be entertaining for a short time as I was hit by a wave of nostalgia, but I don't know how long I could maintain interest, as my expectations from computer games have changed.
It is my impression that for the 7-13 year old crowd, these kinds of games exist and are as fun as they were when I was that age even now, however.
The fact is that these Construction Set games were never wildly popular. With a lot of effort, you could create a game that still didn't quite measure up to commercial versions. And that was when commercial games were designed by a couple of guys in a garage, not a huge teame or programmers, designers, artists and musicians. I imagine that there is still just about as much activity with mod creation as there ever was with "Construction Set" games. Whether or not the product is really "standalone" makes no practical difference.
And don't forget all of the "Sim" type games on PC. While these aren't "game construction kits," they are a lot like computerized legos, and similarly appeal to the desire to design and construct something.
Reminds me of a 20-foot pole.
What's a 20-foot pole? It's what I wouldn't use to not touch what I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, twice.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Unless it has boobs or a big gun attached to it, game companies won't bother trying to market it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
1.2 is irrelevent as far as the game itself goes, I understand, based on a post by BioWare that it only modified the toolset. (As such it didn't have to go through the same quality control tests as the next full patch, for good or bad). 1.2 was just to fix the module corruption bug in the toolset.
As far as bugs go I'm actually impressed with NwN. Sure, it has its bugs and quirks, but NONE of them seem fatal and it has been quite stable for me, even when abused. (I have crashed it with a bad script or two, but they were REALLY bad..)
I noticed it doesn't do Path finding very well. But that isn't the end of the world.
On the other hand, if your unlucky enough to be using an ATI card, well lets just say I feel sorry for you.
Coldstone is a new and cool game construction kit. I haven't used it, but it looks promising.
I disagree. What's happened is that we've managed to so completely manipulate the environment that we've redefined "fittest". Now, instead of health/strength making one "fit", it's money/looks/social grace. "Fit" is whatever manages to perpetuate your genome.
The controllers (USB devices) have a memory card slot that can take an 8Mb card. That should be plenty of storage to hold one or two user-created levels (depending on textures, etc).
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
My first laptop was a compaq 286. The thing may have been shit, but it had faster response times than my winshit system at work. I wish I still had that thing. My only complaint was that the lappie was completely sealed off with no screws or clasps to get inside.
I guess that illustrates the point of this article.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Omega...heh. I quickly found that just sitting my tank there and spending all my cycles scanning and letting the enemy tank come to me got me very far in the game...and then of course I couldn't go any further, since I hadn't learned anything besides my one neat trick...an evolutionary deadend, so to speak.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
If they are capable of reading, they are capable of using the shell. How many kids were playing around with Apple II's and MS-DOS machines during the 1980's? I was using CP/M and programming in BASIC at the age of seven. I believe that any child that can read at an appropriate level for a seven-year-old can learn to use the command line. The GUI is probably necessary for pre-literate children, although I doubt the value of computers to children of that age.
Best Slashdot comment ever
It's not exactly the same idea as the "Construction Kits" you're refering to, but it is targetted towards children who want to create their own games. There is already a complete game available, although it's missing graphics here and there, it's still playable from beginning to end.
sidenote: it's tough to meet all of the dependancies under Linux, but with Windows all you need to install is the Microsoft Text-To-Speech API, and you're good to go.
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
A possible reason why you don't see the construction set games anymore that I don't think anyone has touched on yet is the growth of the hacker culture. Back when the construction set games were around, the hacker culture was confined largely to colleges and labs. Didn't Zork start on a mainframe in Fortran somewhere? The construction set games brought a kind of pseudo-hacker culture to non-hackers. Without having to know a lot of code, they could build their own games and run them.
But nowadays, many of these pseudo-hackers became real hackers. Now people build games from scratch. Witness the explosion in recent years in freeware/OSS game projects. Not many people focus on construction set games because they're busy building their own original games.
As for me, I think I get more joy out of the construction of the game mechanics rather than the actual coding of the game core. For that reason [begin shameless plug] I've been working on my own Perl modules to do game construction (I've only just started -- if any Perl programmers out there are interested, look for module Games::Object on search.cpan.org. I hope to have Games::TileMap released soon as well). I doubt I'll be leading any revolution with my efforts, but at least I'll get to put out a few games that I've been thinking about over the years.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Simpler games that included a powerful "level editor" to create and save your own levels and share them with other users were generally better than the more general purpose "construction set" apps.
Anybody else here remember the original C=64 "Racing Destruction Set. Apparently, there is work on a PC remake.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I only wish they had Lego Mindstorms back when I was a kid.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
The best 'Constructon Set' in recent memory was the level editor in Crack Dot Com's sidescroller, 'Abuse'. It used a lisp driven engine to allow you to make levels easier than anything I recall at the time.
Abuse was released as free software. You can now run it on DOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, even Irix. If you can score a copy of Abuse you can run the original levels, and if not you can run the "fRaBs" (Free levels for Abuse).
Debian users "apt-get install abuse-sdl". (Sound effects are in "abuse-sfx" which is in non-free.)
Everyone else http://www.abuse2.com/downloads.php3
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Every other game released today is (except maybe Blizzard's).
;P
You haven't been hanging out in the Open Support forum over at Blizzard's Battle.net site...War3 is (quite literally) unplayable on many systems out there due to a number of fairly nasty crash bugs.
In comparison, the few bugs in NWN seem insignifigant
A shell command line may feel more elite and productive because it doesn't have any pretty picutres, but it's certainly not proof of intellect...
Shells are not about proving ones intellect, they're about having a powerful interface. It's a simple entropy argument that more information can be transmitted from user to computer, and thus more complicated structures can be communicated far more rapidly, using a command line rather than a gui.
I have a rather typical Debian install, and it has 2511 commands in the path. Not all, but a huge number of these commands are designed to interact in a variety of ways by piping, substitution, etc... There is simply no way to transmit that much information complexity to the computer at any reasonable rate using a mouse.
I can sit at a shell and in 30 seconds write a command to change every file in 4 different directories from file.txt to prefix_file.txt. There is absolutely no way to design a gui with enough power to perform arbitrary complex actions like that. Any gui that powerful would be too unwieldy to use.
Don't get me wrong, gui's are great for simple actions. My primary interface is a gui, but my most powerful command in that gui is ctrl-alt-t to bring up a terminal window.
Like this? Fits the bill perfectly.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
"I have a more detailed OS experience at a cash machine."
/. and some other *nix sites as well. In *MY* experience, the command line use forces or at least encourages (I'm not too sure about this but it seems this way to me) one to a) know how the computer/os works, and b) think in a manner that encourages one to build a model of what one wants to do in one's mind.
I'm a regular reader of a lot of Mac boards, being a Mac user myself. I also read
This has nothing to do with elitism, and is simply an observation. Another thing I have observed is that many people who do *not* understand the shell will critisize it as being too difficult or primitive. Difficulty flexes the brain IMO just like physical sport flexes the body.
Young children are fantastically good at learning languages by example, but often not good at predicate logic or deductive reasoning, which takes a lot of training. (As an aside, the book Reading Reflex applies this insight to teaching reading - instead of teaching deductive rules parrot fashion, it groups different representations of the same sound and gets the children to work through them until they derive an unconscious model that way).
The best 'programming' exercise with small children is the 'I am a robot' game. You play their robot slave, and do what you are told, but very literally, and in small stages, with 'error messages' returned in a robot voice. Just getting you to walk from the sofa to the bedroom can take ages and they love it. They naturally want to be the simple-minded robot too (just make sure they don't get too attached to it, or they may end up working in telephone support).
I've seen a huge amount of 'educational' software - I used to work in the CD-ROM business, and I buy up remaindered CD's from Marshalls for my 2 boys and watch how they use them. Most of them are dross, with the same few ideas (Pelmanism, missing words etc.) recycled with a different character or brand attached. Some have genuine insight, and I can see them learning to reason using them. Here are a selection:
Logical Journey of the Zoombinis is a wonderful introduction to deductive logic through a compelling game. It was designed with this in mind and my boys have been playing this since they were 3, and are still enjoying it now at 5 and 7 (as do I).
The Pajama Sam series of adventures from Humongous are good at teaching the global/local focus, but one that is great fun and teaches valuable debugging skills is Pajama Sam's SockWorks which features a long series of machines that have socks in them that you have to get into the right coloured baskets. As you can also build your own puzzles, the idea of solvable and unsolvable problems naturally comes up.
Zap! is another great game that teaches by stealth. You have to help 3 wisecracking cartoon charcters to fix their electrical, optical and audio-visual gadgets to get their show on the road. It manages to include a compelte circuit simulator, an optical workbench simulator and sound environment simulator, and still be lots of fun for Kindergarten children.
To teach programming concepts without writing textual code, Cocoa is perfect (if you have a Mac). It is a tool that enables you to create 2d video games by drawing the characters and defining what happens when they encounter each other by example. Andrew has made about 65 games with this, some original, some homages to TV programs or his brother's films.
Finally, if you want a comprehensible textual language, use Runtime Revolution, whose language Transcript is based on the old Apple HyperCard language, and as such has completely human-readable programs. This is what I plan to get Andrew into next.
(republished from my blog, May 12th 2002)
One construction set type game I've enjoyed is Coaster Works on the Dreamcast (Jet Coaster Dream in Japan). In this you construct a roller coaster, then test it. If the coaster falls off, you have to redesign. If the coaster makes a full circuit, you get graded on safety, excitement etc.
There's a JCD2 out in Japan; must get around to importing it.
You description is more what I remember, though I never did any "fancy ML" programming where I might have learned much about the internals.
The BASIC was good enough for me (I was 10). I spent hours calculating out two color sprites on graph paper. I think games are too good and too plentiful these days - kids just don't seem to have the same drive to learn programming (or even what's going on behind the icons).
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
If the power supply and disk drive of that machine had been more reliable I might have one sitting around still.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Always crapped out. We bought a little fan for ours, and it would still overheat in about an hour.
At the time, all the sprite stuff made no sense - I was just tampering with the sacred cryptic code out of the manual. It would be fun to go back, now that I have some ideas about what sorts of registers I'd be "POKE"ing data into.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Also, as a matter of curiosity, amid the false hits, I occasionally get good tidbits on Google (search for "Build your own" and "game").
I did my part by posting the links. Now, why won't they get looked at seriously? Because they, like, use those grody 2D graphics, or worse yet, text! What are they, 1D? Everything these days is 3D or better!
I think it's a matter of three different problems: 1) technical sophistication, 2) thematic sophistication, 3) and a need for immediate gratification, and I think the Cold Stone above highlights all three.
1) Technical Sophisticaion involves the game's engine. How sophisticated by today's standards is it? 2D graphics won't get taken seriously. People spend thousands cobbling together the latest and utmost hardware, they want something that'll *use* that hardware. Construction set games like the Cold Stone above will take up a shamefully small resource footprint on the machine of your choice.
Another factor under this banner is the complexity of construction: "Welcome to the Turing Tarpits, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy." How much work would it take to build a game with a full degree of technical sophistication? By the time you did that, you might as well be programming in C++ and OpenGL, and prepping the blasted thing to market.
To make a long point short (too late!), any toolkit which makes game which meet peoples' technical expectations will be too complicated and hard to use for casual use -- nobody will want to play with them.
2) Thematic Sophistication is a matter of story within a game. Some times this isn't necessary; a pinball machine isn't going to have much of a story line behind it (unless it was made after 1988), and first person shooters don't necessarily need a lot of plot.
But adventure games do, and to expect the average person to sit down with something like ColdStone and put together a compelling adventure is akin to having the average person sit down with a word processor and put together a compelling novel.
Most people realize that they lack the talent for something like this, and so they don't. Maybe to experiment with, which makes the construction sets little more than a toy in that regard.
3) Immediate Gratification means you want to be satisfied *now now now now now!* And you're not going to get that kind of gratification if you have to sit down with the toolkit and read the f'ing manual to learn how it works. Then there's the time spent assembling graphics, selecting (or recording?) sounds, and making the package coherent. No, people plunk down $30-$50 for something, and they want to be amused by it right away.
The same was true way back when, too, but at least the toolkits were simplistic enough then that you could have fun experimenting. I remember not having to read a manual on Pinball Construction Set (a copy of which I still have somewhere at home for the Apple II). I bet Cold Stone has a lot of manuals with it.
Commentary welcome. I would especially like to be proved wrong here...
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
There's then the games where you get to construct objects, not the games themselves, which many people have been discussing. They may be cool, but they're a seperate class of item. Yes, designing your own robot is cool, or designing a car, etc, but it's not the same as 'designing' your own game.
The other category which people have commented on are the build your own level type things. Neverwinter Nights, Quake, Halflife, even back to the days of Doom. Yes, they're nice, but they then require the original program to play, and the editors are developed by people other than the people who wrote the engines.
Personally, I'd suggest to people interested in writing their own games to look at muds. Yes, the majority of them are text based, but there are a few graphical muds out there. Many of the text based engines have been released to the public, and there's a graphical engine, Worldforge, but I have no idea what their current status is.
Anyway, an interesting read from the Slashdot archives:
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.