Hey folks–many of you know I’ve been part of a team that is working on a computer roleplaying game that lets players follow the steps of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. We’ll we’re still a ways away from being done, but we have been making progress. Below is a video of the game as it stands so far. The graphics are what we call “placeholder”; graphics are expensive and time-intensive to create, and so won’t be pretty until pretty close to the game’s release. But the essential gameplay is really getting close.

You can see for yourself in the video below. The voiceover is performed by Joshua DeBonis, the project’s lead designer, programmer, manager, and pretty much every other “-er” you can think of.

If you can’t see anything above, follow this link to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TAqMjoi9LM&feature=player_embedded.

Enjoy!

Click on the pic below to see it @ YouTube:

Or, if you can, just watch it below:

Still, innovation happens, usually on the level of individuals striking out on their own. Here are two of my favorites from the article:

Meet Robert Dick. He put a whammy bar on his flute. (Click on pic for link to video)

To me, this is the perfect marriage between innovation and tradition. A flautist with this baby could play any “normal” flute piece without using the whammy, but it’s there when you want it.

I dig Ben Neill’s triple-digi-trumpet — he calls it a “mutantrumpet” — for different reasons. Mr. Neill’s custom made trumpet is a custom made affair with three bells, a trombone-esque slide, and several pick-ups to connect his instrument to three different computers as he plays. Two of them are devoted to digitizing his sound as he plays; the third actually controls images that he syncs live to his musical stylings. Pretty incredible. Below is a spot he did on Tech TV where he goes into greater detail about the instrument:

The market would definitely be more niche than tried-and-true classical music, but there has to be a place for these terrific new ways to make music, right? I’d pay to see both.

Creative Commons photo of soldiers in action, courtesy of U.S. Army Africa: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usarmyafrica/4092343850/

Not sure how I feel about this. Wired has a report today that Dr. Michael Mithoefer and nurse Anne Mithoefer have gotten a $500,000 grant to see if soldiers with PTSD can be treated by giving them Ecstasy.

Don’t want to be a prude here, but isn’t Ecstasy largely not understood, and what is understood suggests that there are a host of physiological and cognitive problems that can arise from prolonged use?

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies that is funding this study (sounds like a fun place to work!). And it’s been approved by both the FDA and the DEA. So all of these agencies wouldn’t put traumatized veterans needlessly at risk by giving them a drug that will in the long terms do more harm than good, right?

But our government also runs a page called drugabuse.gov, where its page about MDMA states the following:

MDMA can produce confusion, depression, sleep problems, drug craving, and severe anxiety. These problems can occur soon after taking the drug or, sometimes, even days or weeks after taking MDMA. In addition, chronic users of MDMA perform more poorly than nonusers on certain types of cognitive or memory tasks, although some of these effects may be due to the use of other drugs in combination with MDMA. Research in animals indicates that MDMA can be harmful to the brain—one study in nonhuman primates showed that exposure to MDMA for only 4 days caused damage to serotonin nerve terminals that was still evident 6 to 7 years later.¹ Although similar neurotoxicity has not been shown definitively in humans, the wealth of animal research indicating MDMA’s damaging properties strongly suggests that MDMA is not a safe drug for human consumption.

Color me crazy, but I, even as a non-expert civilian, have been hearing for a decade that MDMA can cause brain impairment. Drugabuse.gov ends by saying that the effects of MDMA on the brain are still being studied, but that “not a safe drug for human consumption” statement is fairly definitive nonetheless.

I’m just wondering about the justification. Is it because so little is known about what Ex will do to a brain that this study is being conducted? That sounds to me like we’re conducting a pretty risky brand of human vivisection on soldiers.

On the other hand, if the soldiers in the study are so crippled by their PTSD that they have no quality of life, and if no other remedies have worked for them, and they are willing to try an untested medicine in the hopes of finding an effective treatment, it would be hard for me to not sign off on the experiment.

So yeah. Still not sure how I feel.

I think I get what most of the categories are. “Dark cover of meaninglessness” is a little vague; but then, it’s probably supposed to be. And “headshots,” disappointingly, is not as in “Boom, headshot!” but more like a close-up of some fantasy character’s head. Ah, well: maybe “boom, headshot!”s will make the chart next year.

After reading Castro’s My Life–an autobiography through interviews–I became convinced that he is, in the Miltonic sense, Luciferian: often he is logically valid, but logically unsound; he is at times sympathetic, but often loathsome; and he prefers conflict to compromise. Increasingly, though, he seems to be growing paranoid-delusional, as his Osama/CIA agent theory attests.

It will be interesting to follow the blog and determine how manicured and managed it is, or if Fidel will post whatever he happens to be thinking. I’m hoping for the latter, but my guess is that it’s the former; after all, the blog as I read it is in English, and I doubt that’s the language Castro would use! Still, Fidel, if nothing else, is difficult to reign in. I wonder if anything juicy will get through. One can only hope.

And this is a picture of Mr. Ray Bradbury’s reaction to watching the video:

So here’s the trailer they have on the site right now. Note: it’s big on atmosphere and light on information about gameplay:

In case you missed it in the video (or didn’t feel like watching it), in the game you play as either an Apothecary or a Lord of Pestilence (my guess is that each player will choose one, but it might be possible [and, from a game perspective, more interesting] to have both players choose the same side). The goal seems to be, just like in other CCGs, to beat your opponent through better card management. The upshot here isn’t some interesting new twist on the (well-mined) genre of CCGs, but that playing the game teaches you which infectious diseases are vulnerable to which antibodies.

For instance, if you happen to be battling a Lord of Pestilence, and that Lord of Pestilence plays a “Treponema pallidum (T. pallidum)” on you, well, I hope you have a penicillin card to play, else the Lord has just given you syphilis. As you can see from the card below, the “V” seems to indicate what treatment options Lady Pox here would be vulnerable to, whereas “D” (“Description” probably) gives a short, colorful review of symptoms.

N.B. I do worry, slightly, about the male subtext here: what, only male and lesbian warriors get the pox? A small detail, but the semiotics of the game seem to me important beyond just political correctness; they might create misleading subtexts for the diseases and treatments they characterize. So be careful with your text and art, fellas!

Now I know that there haven’t been yet triple-blind, quadruple-deaf studies to prove the efficacy of this method, but I have no doubt whatsoever that this could work as a means to teach med-students this information. If you have ever known any hardcore, mediumcore, or recovering Magic: the Gathering player, you know that those folks know every scintilla of information about the cards — including good cards to combo with them, errata published years ago and absorbed into later editions, and a whole internal vocabulary of powers (doublestrike, phasing, shadow, haste, etc. ad infinitum). But, just as in any game, Magic is compelling because it has superb gameplay, and it is that desire to play that keeps players coming to play again and thereby accidentally learning the game’s recondite argot. If Healing Blade isn’t a great game, it might not work as a teaching tool.

Without having yet played Healing Blade, I am cautiously optimistic about its chances of being a good game. I have three main reasons why. First, it is modifying an existing and proven set of game mechanics: those of the CCG. That means that they do not have to invent compelling mechanics — which is extremely hard to do — but merely keep from ruining the ones that already exist. Second, it’s obvious that the good doctors are geeks and gamers. They know games and the importance of good design, as one of their blog posts on that very topic demonstrates. Third, the art of the game is of professional quality. They’ve thrown a not-insignifant about of money and effort into making this a successful game. These three reasons, added together, don’t guarantee a good game, but they raise my hopes to the level of “plausible.” And honestly, given that even the best game houses put out real stinkers (remember Hecatomb?), “plausible” seems a pretty high plateau to reach for a brand-new company.

And we should also remember that, because this is a serious game, its target audience will come with a built-in motivation for playing: finishing med-school. If the game isn’t flawed, is at least moderately amusing, and proves to be an excellent study tool, then basically the boys at Nerdcore will have found an alternate win-condition for their game business.

But in fact, they already have. They have created a business that does not have the end-goal of generating a profit, but of generating funds to donate to a worthy cause. This is a concept that Dr. Mathews, in his interview with American Medical News, identifies as “social entrepreneurship,” which, as the article explains:

[are businesses which] are created for the purpose of raising money for causes the founders support, as well as using the business as a means of promoting a certain social principle.

In the case of Nerdcore Learning, that principle is medical education. Its signature product, a strategy card game called “The Healing Blade,” is meant to be used as a tool to help medical students learn about infectious diseases.

The money Nerdcore raises by selling the game goes toward an organization Dr. Mathews created called HOPE, Hospital-based Online Pediatric Environment, which provides video game consoles to pediatric hospitals. (Dr. Mathews has written research articles on the effectiveness of the use of gaming by pediatric patients as a means to increase self-esteem and decrease isolation.) Other charities may be added.

There’s not much more that Drs. Mathews and Kong could do right in creating this game; from where I’m standing, every aspect of the game and the business behind it is uncloudedly altruistic. Here’s hoping that the game is as good as everything else about Nerdcore Games.

P.S. The game was released in March and apparently can be bought through Amazon, but Amazon’s saying that they have no such product right now. Hope The Healing Blade is back on sale soon.

Courtesy of NASA's Creative Commons Flickr Feed. They even conveniently provided their own very thorough description of it: "This is the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit one hour before sunrise on the 63rd Martian day, or sol, of its mission. (March 8, 2004) The image is a mosaic of images taken by the rover's navigation camera showing a broad view of the sky, and an image taken by the rover's panoramic camera of Earth. The contrast in the panoramic camera image was increased two times to make Earth easier to see.The inset shows a combination of four panoramic camera images zoomed in on Earth. The arrow points to Earth. Earth was too faint to be detected in images taken with the panoramic camera's color filters. --Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/Texas A&M"

This is my favorite of the Wired pics. Pure profession envy.