OLPC Game Jam for an XO Laptop

An anonymous reader writes "The OLPC project has announced a three-day game development jam session is scheduled to begin June 8 on the campus of Olin College, an engineering school in Needham, Massachusetts. 'The game jam is an opportunity for developers to create new types of games that rely on features of the XO's design such as mesh networking between nearby users, an integrated still or video camera, and a tablet mode for mobile gaming. Beyond creating games that teach specific tasks like counting or reading, OLPC hopes the contest will produce templates that allow kids to build their own games, according to OLPC's development guidelines.' The grand prize is a free OLPC laptop. All games created at the weekend-long event will be licensed under the GNU General Public License, and posted on the SourceForge site."

Comments

Re:Novelty item?

[gEvil (beta)]

How likely does the grand prize winner(s) need an OLPC laptop?

If you're taking part in this competition, chances are very good that you support the mission of the OLPC program. If you win and receive an actual unit, it just makes further development and testing for the platform that much easier for you. It's more about supporting the goal than it is about the payout (hey, isn't that what OSS is generally about?).

Re:I see it

[apathy maybe]

Please don't be fucking stupid. The whole think of the children shit is bullshit. Don't fear monger. The following is from a post I made at another forum (RevLeft.com) http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=66768&v iew=findpost&p=1292321122 .

If nothing else, as I said earlier, most sexual abuse on children is by relatives and close family friends. It isn't by "paedophiles", but is rather simply opportunistic. The people we should be worried about are those who actually are abusive, not just those who have thoughts that maybe abusive (or maybe about consensual sex for all we know).
QUOTE (http://www.nncc.org/Abuse/sex.abuse.html)
Eighty-five percent of sexual assaults on children are committed by someone the child knows and usually trusts - an immediate family member, a relative, a neighbor, or a friend of the family.

QUOTE (http://www.ocfs.state.ny.us/main/publications/Pub 1154text.asp)
In many cases reported in New York State and nationwide, children are sexually abused by people they know and trust - relatives (even parents or siblings), friends of the family, and authority figures (teachers, youth group leaders, clergy, etc.). Sexual abuse usually occurs in places where children feel comfortable or safe - at home or in the home of a family friend.

QUOTE (http://www.bbc.co.uk/parenting/your_kids/safety_s exual.shtml)
Sexual abuse is far more likely to be carried out by someone a child knows, such as a relative or friend of the family, than by a stranger. And sometimes older children abuse younger children.

Or hey

[Kamineko]

Here's a better idea: release some kind of unified API that will allow folks with regular hardware to build games for the OLPC.

Re:Or hey

[CajunArson]

You can do that now with a virtual machine image (see the wiki). I have been able to boot it in qemu and even developed my own game for it using straight-up python & pygtk. However, my game can also run on any box that has python & pygtk, it is not taking advantage of any OLPC-specific software or hardware. One advantage of having everybody in a single physical location is that things like the built-in networking and cameras can be tested out.
    A little OT, but I think that the interface is generally pretty good, but at least so far in the beta builds the file-selection dialogs for opening up text & drawings are still the (absolutely atrocious) Gnome defaults that are made even worse because the limited screen real estate on OLPC means the fields are too small to even see properly. Making a simplified and OLPC-friendly file dialog would be a major improvement.

Re:Airfare?

[bfields]

How is it possible for the vast majority of people who wish to compete in these events to do so without having to spend hundreds of dollars on round-trip airfare?

It looks like there's also a $100 registration fee, but that includes food and lodging for the event. Seems to me like they're actually working pretty hard to keep it inexpensive. There's also a scholarship to reduce the costs for students. I'm sure they'd be happy to do more, given the money--see their donation page if you know anyone that could chip in.

Re:Novelty item?

[LiquidCoooled]

I do quite a bit of development for my PDA and whilst I have an emulator environment for it whilst developing, nothing says "usability test" better than putting it on the device and going sitting away from a real pc with a mouse.

The Incredible Machine!

[schweini]

The killer game for the OLPC would be an open-sourced "The Incredible Machine" clone, i think. Whatever happened to that franchise, anyhow?One of the greatest non-violent games ever created, IMHO.
Something along the SimCity games would be cool, too, i guess.
Maybe the owners of those franchises (Dynamix [?] and Maxis) could even help out a bit, for PR reasons?