OpenRA also has a new release

OpenRA is a Free Software recreation of the famed Command & Conquer engine, and it aims to support and enhance all Westwood games originally built upon it, namely Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, and Dune 2000. However, unlike most engine remakes, OpenRA isn't a simple 1:1 recreation with a little streamlining here and there, as the project also aims to optimize and rebalance the gameplay for purposes of online multiplayer. The project has recently released the latest stable version, fixing a lot of bugs and adding plenty of new features, as seen on the following release trailer:

Interestingly enough, in order to play all the games supported by OpenRA, you are not forced to own an original copy of any, given that all three ones were released gratis a few years ago. Though the package comes without any of this data, it immediately invites the player to download it from the project's own repositories, thus making all the games readily available to play.

The campaign mode is still not fully supported by OpenRA, with only some missions available for playing and no cinematics support at all, but we can only hope this will change in the future. In the meantime, you're free to enjoy all the supported games in skirmish mode, or play online against friends. So here's to the OpenRA team, and keep up the good work.

Code license: GPLv3

Assets license: Free-as-in-beer (available gratis, but still subject to copyright, as the C&C franchise is still intellectual property currently owned by EA)

Official website

Source code (Github)

YSoccer out of Beta

Since football is all the rage right now - unless you are hiding under a rock then you can't have escaped the World Cup - then a little bit of football game news seems appropriate!

The game formerly known as Yoda Soccer has left beta and been unleashed upon the classic pixel soccer game world as YSoccer.

YSoccer version 14

If you never played Sensible Soccer, then you may not yet get what the fuss is all about - if that's the case then you should download it and give it a try!

Sadly football games are a little under served in the open source game community. Bygfoot and Eat the Whistle are quite playable, if a little raw. Project Football is almost a game. Open Football and Open World Soccer never quite got off the ground.

Project Football looked great but was last updated 4 years ago

YSoccer stands out amongst them and deserves a bit more attention than it probably gets.

EDIT: I feel I was a little unfair to Open World Soccer. If you download 0.5 (the most recent release, from 2010) you can see it is quite close to being a playable game. It is by the same guys as YSoccer and was originally an attempt to get away from the proprietary language that YSoccer is written in. You could even say it was intended to be a full port of YSoccer from Blitzmax to C++ (the author suggests so).

Shabbat in Berkeley, Back in Israel

Gamification conference post still to come. Here's the rest of my trip:

I spent shabbat in Berkeley around the synagogue Congregation Beth Israel. The area was pleasant and suburban. The shul does not arrange places for visitors to sleep (there are many every week), but they arrange meals. The couple Ruchama and Avraham Burrell took me for Friday night meal. They invite any stray travelers for shabbat meals, as they have been hosting people for over twenty years now and they consider it a life mission of sorts. Contact me for details.

Another couple hosted me for shabbat lunch. At both meals I ran into souls who had gone through, or were in the process of going through, difficult times: who had MS, who had been (in the past) homeless in San Francisco, who were estranged from their families, whose mother had recently died but who had no support network for grieving and no connection to a Jewish community (this was her first time in a synagogue). They were offered community, support, and meals.

At shul, they said psalms multiple times for the three boys who went missing and appear to have been kidnapped by Hamas.

BART took me to the airport on Sunday morning and the trip home was uneventful, which was surprising for me. Even the TSA agents who patted me down were more relaxed than the ones in Philadelphia.

OpenXcom hits 1.0

We have previously mentioned OpenXcom on several occasions before, but now the massive UFO: Enemy Unknown engine reimplementation project finally hit the long-awaited 1.0 mark, and they decided to celebrate by releasing this lovely trailer that sums up quite well the insane amount of detail and improvement put into the project over the course of 4 years. I'll let it do justice by itself, but not without thanking all the contributors for raising one of the most acclaimed DOS-era strategy classics from the stagnating swamps of buggy unsupported legacy releases and platform incompatibility.

On a final note, the engine is, of course, free-as-in-freedom, though it relies on original game data of proprietary nature. You can download OpenXcom here, and buy an affordable digital copy of the original game on Steam, or somewhere around the web.

Code License: GPLv3

Assets License: Relies on original proprietary data files. All new original art assets included in the OXC package available under CC-BY-SA

Official Website
Source Code (Github)

The Both (Aimee Mann and Ted Leo) in Concert

I saw The Both in concert at the Great American Music Hall, with the opening act Nick Diamonds (Thorburn) of Islands.

Nick Diamonds of Islands

Nick and his accompanist were interesting. He plays indie rock. It was hard to hear the lyrics because the mics were too low; the music and melodies were pleasant; they were not catchy hit songs, but they also sounded like they were not trying to be. I think his music would be best at an acoustic house concert. Nothing in the arrangements stood out, and without full access to the words, it was just ok (he also performed a number of covers).

The Both

Aimee Mann is famous for her hit song Voices Carry from the band 'Til Tuesday in the 1980s, after which she has had additional success as a solo artist (Academy and Grammy awards, though no other top ten hits).

I know less about Ted Leo, but his guitar playing was very good. The two spent a lot of time bantering and telling stories with each other and to the crowd (too much time, I thought, though they were funny). The crowd knew a number of their songs, collectively and individually. Their melodies and arrangements were exceptionally good, and their play (including a drummer) was tight. Everything they played could be a hit record. Like with Nick, the mics were low and it was hard to hear the singing; what I heard was serviceable. I'm inspired that Aimee Mann still rocks out at age 54, but she doesn't (can't?) belt it out like she once did in the above video. I was pleased she played the one song I knew during the encore.

Meanwhile

A description of the gamification conference is in the works.

The rest of my SF trip has not been notable. Pier 39 is so over-commercialized and so touristy I would compare it to visiting a web page that contains nothing but (mostly irrelevant) splashy and shallow advertisements. Shudder. I saw some sea lions that looked depressed.

Sea lions

Chinatown is funky if you dig Chinese groceries, but similar to what I saw in Sunset. Downtown is unremarkable and has lots of homeless. The one kosher restaurant is ok but overpriced. The area I stayed in, near the freeway entrance/exit, is bare and impoverished.

The only other moment of interest was a short trip to see my friend L'vannah and her baby. She lives in a gorgeous home in San Carlos.

L'vannah and baby

The view from her backyard

Think Your Game is Educational? Here’s How You Can Prove It

GlassLab's Evidence Centered game Design (ECgD) assessment engine can prove scientifically if your game really helps players learn [1]. Alternatively, it can help you redesign your game so that it does. That makes GlassLab’s approach to playification different: rather than construct games to provide education, they discover and elicit education from within existing games.

GlassLab’s assessment engine can be hooked into video games using an API on a variety of platforms. Players’ choices while playing the game are sent to the assessment engine, which provides multiple views into the metrics generated during each game session. Each player’s performance can then be assessed to determine if they are actually learning.

On Monday I visited Zynga’s San Francisco HQ in the company of Tamas Makany, a learning designer at GlassLab Games. GlassLab is a non-profit put together by the Institute of Play, Electronic Arts, and other entities interested in the intersection of digital games and education.

Creating the right hooks requires not only the API, but also the assistance of GlassLab's learning experts and statisticians to:

• Identify what students are supposed to learn.
• Construct metrics to measure that this learning process is actually taking place.
• Identify (or create) the game mechanics that provide these metrics.

For GlassLab's own games, they also design the user interface and experience and provide assistance to teachers to help them implement the games in the classroom.

GlassLab currently has two games. The first is a modified version of SimCity called SimCityEDU that GlassLab built using the actual SimCity code under license. The game provides multiple missions that start SimCity at specific states and require students to handle specific problems, such as how to reduce carbon emissions in their city while still providing the city with sufficient power. The second game is Mars Generation One: Argubot Academy, an original game from GlassLab featuring squabbling Martians that requires players to assess whether and how much certain sentences support an argument. The Martians then simulate a debate using the players’ arguments as weapons.

Both games are built to teach lessons based on Common Core educational standards.

[1] ECgD is based on the principles of evidence centered design, a methodology that ensures that what you think is happening is really happening.

Day 3: Two San Francisco Festivals

The first was Union Street Festival. This was a festival like any other, with light entertainment, local and chain food stands, and local and chain artisans. Mostly local. What made it San Francisco, or California, was the high proportion of products and services that are new age, artisinal, fair trade, vegan, gluten-free crystal, yoga, etc. People were very supportive of "kosher", too; though much of what they sold wasn't kosher, the idea of kosher in California is apparently new-agey, like gluten-free and hand-sourced.

The second was the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair. This festival is more like retro hippieville than like actual hippieville. Many vendors were posers making a lot of money selling generic products (like tie-dyed shirts and stuff) to tourists, but some of the people and products looked authentic. There were drugged out looking guys lolling about on the street and the smell of hemp was pervasive. The music was raucous, and the bands were actual bands of the sixties/seventies or bands that played similar music.

The Union Street Festival had items like cold-brewed coffee, soy kale shakes, and light brunch foods, in addition to barbecue and beer, while the Haight-Ashbury Fair was mostly barbecue and beer.

I walked back from HASF through the park.

Plaque dedicated to Allen Ginsberg

Sign reads: Herbs to help you feel happy, healthy, horny, and naturally high

In today's Haight-Ashbury, the freaks and the pigs mix comfortably.

Haight-Ashbury

Duck and turtles in Golden Gate Park

Boats on the lake in Golden Gate Park

Gamification: Adding Fun

This is my fourth post on gamification and motivational strategy (see Adding Purpose, Adding Autonomy, and Adding Mastery). A successful strategy can use some form of gamification, as well as other tools, to develop and enhance motivation from within.

In this post I present how to provide opportunities for fun.

A gamification process is empty if the process is not compelling. Adding points and so on must be complemented with fun. Too many gamification procedures leave this as an exercise for the reader. They tell you to add fun, but they don't tell you how to do this. "Make sure it's fun! Tweak it until it is!" [1]

You can create fun in a gamification system by luck; I wouldn't rely on it. Odds are high that luck won't be on your side and your system will fail, as most do.

You can create fun by stealing a tested game design from an existing game and slapping a new theme onto it with some gamification extras. This is a popular choice for many designers, and it has the benefit of presenting game mechanics that requires little or no further explanation to its users. The drawback is that the original game is also accessible to the player, and probably already has a bigger fan base (their friends already play it), so they will probably only play with your system if they are forced to (or the theme is killer).

Alternately, you can create fun by designing and testing a good game. For this you need a game designer who understands fun. First time game designers often fail at fun. Successful, proven game designers have a decent track record for creating subsequent games that are also fun. Once you know how to find fun, you are more likely to find it again (not always, but more often than people who never find it in the first place).

Any design for fun requires extensive play testing with a wide variety of people types. Different people have different ideas about what is fun. Don't expect the same interest in a particular activity from the CEO, the graphic designer, the call center operator, and the 8th grade student.

The elements of fun include the following:

• Socializing: Many people's idea of fun is sharing time and conversation with family and friends. A game can be a backdrop against which they socialize. Either the game itself becomes a topic of discussion (such as humorous party games) or it simply keeps the hands occupied and fills in the pauses in the conversation. Winning or losing might be entertaining but irrelevant to their motivation for playing. Examples: parties, meetings, cooperation (less serious), eating or drinking, downtime.
  
  You can build social activity into gamification by having competitive or cooperative activities that do not require the players' undivided attention while they complete the tasks. Play can be set during group activities, such as a meal or "fun day". Interaction is key.
• Entertainment: Entertainment can be be either thoughtful or mindless, such as Sudoku, Candy Crush, YouTube, gossip, conversation, action/adventure movies, fantasy, and so on. Dramatic entertainment can be fun even when it is serious or poignant (though perhaps not when it is morbid).
  
  You can include entertainment by splicing in entertainment media (adding sound or movie clips), by creating dramatic stories around which to hang your activities, or by providing simple, non-challenging game play with well-build, accessible achievements, levels, and bonuses.


• Aesthetics: Many people's idea of fun includes aesthetic or sensual pleasure: art, music, film, eros, food, nature, and other such things. In gamification contexts, this also includes well-presented graphics, pictures, or sounds.
• Recreation: Many people's fun includes sport, exercise, vertigo (swings, balancing, alcohol), and so on to be fun, while others find these to be work or painful. Many people don't have the necessary abilities to partake in these kinds of activities.
  
  You can include recreation with any activity that requires your body to participate, from treasure hunts, to races, to physical touch (use with caution).
• Challenge: See my post about adding mastery. Despite what you might have understood from reading Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun, challenges are fun for some people at some times, but not for all people at all times. Challenges are the best fun for personal growth; our brains are wired to see and solve safe problems. But many people simply don't want to expand their brains, especially after they have spent a day already using them at work or school. For these people, challenges are not fun.
  
  Example challenges include puzzles, pattern matching tasks, trading, auctioning, racing, cooperation, and competition.
• Humor: Comedy, laughter, funny or inappropriate graphics, pictures, or sounds. Most people describe comedy, pratfalls, or anything else that makes them laugh as fun, or having fun. Examples: humorous stories or characters, funny roles or costumes, ridiculous challenges.

You can remember these elements by their acronym: SEARCH.

[1] Some gamification proponents claim that acquiring points is inherently fun. This ill-conceived notion might lead to a short burst of interest from someone who discovers a "game-like" system in a non-game context, but this interest will quickly fade (all the more so as gamification becomes more ubiquitous). Worse, a person lured into a "game-like process" that is not fun can feel betrayed, demotivated, and disappointed, leading to the exact opposite of gamfication's intent.

Day 2: San Francisco Shabbat

Shabbat was quiet. I was invited to daven Carlebach on Friday night, which was nice. Dinner at the Rabbi's house. Lunch was given by someone at the shul. The rabbi and his wife know the family that my nephew married and were at the wedding (as was I). The guest speaker and his wife knew me (or at least my parents) since they live in my old neighborhood in Beit Shemesh. I'm no longer even surprised by things like this. The eruv does not extend to the ocean or to Golden Gate Park, and I didn't feel like  bothering the guy who owns the house to keep the key for me.

With not much to do in the afternoon, I wandered around until I came to a laundromat that had some magazines around for people waiting for their clothes. One was a New Yorker with a lovely story from Nathan Englander: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank [PDF]. Shabbat was out so late that there was not much time to do anything (leastwise, when you have no one to do it with).

Day 1: Sunset District San Francisco

Sunset District in San Francisco is beautiful. I was expecting "urban"; it looks like England small-town urban, not big city urban.

This morning, with little jet lag except for a head buzz, I left my AirBnB apt on 31st and Lawton and walked to the Safeway on Noriega to buy groceries. Despite rumors to the contrary, the supermarket has everything kosher I could possibly need, except meat. It is possible to find thousands of kosher products in pretty much any supermarket across America and Canada without any difficulty. The only problems will be meat and wine (this supermarket actually had kosher wine, as well as some Hebrew National hot dogs).

Dropped off the groceries and walked down Lawton to the beach. All of the houses are pastel and pretty. The streets are clean. The air is foggy and chilly. Birds chattering, little in the way of traffic, and everyone drives very slowly. At least half of the population appears to be Asian (Korean or Chinese, I'm guessing). On the streets with stores (Irving, Noriega), store after store has signs in both English and Chinese, with hundreds of Asian-style restaurants and Asian food markets.

Sunset District, Lawton St looking from 31st Ave

Street names are etched into the sidewalk. Street signs have house number ranges on them.

 

The beach was nearly entirely deserted with the odd jogger or two. It's clean and expansive.

Off the end of Lawton is the Pacific Ocean

One of my only fellow life forms on the beach

There were red rose singles dropped on the beach every thirty feet or so. Was this due to something happy or something gone awry?

I walked north and crossed over to Golden Gate Park, also very lovely in the corner that I saw.

Entrance to Golden Gate Park

In the park

I tried to get a SIM card in a Verizon store, but they don't sell SIM cards, only phones with plans. While waiting in line I struck up a conversation with a mom and teen who were buying a new iPhone 5S to replace their two year old iPhone 4S; the only way to renew their plan is to buy a new phone, apparently. I was already considering whether to spend money to replace my own tired one, and was looking at picking up a Samsung Galaxy S3 from Amazon. When I asked, they said that I could just have their old one for whatever I felt, since they would probably toss it out otherwise.

Sad. It's weird how these phones cost a huge bundle if you buy them unlocked but since they are given out for free with service plans they become valueless.  Even programs that encourage you donate old cell phones often just recycle or safely dispose of the materials in them (which is better than having them dumped in a landfill, I suppose).

I picked up a SIM from T-Mobile.

I also checked out the synagogue I will be visiting this shabbat. They are setting me up for dinner and having a communal lunch, as well as hosting a rabbi-in-residence.

Shabbat shalom.

Day 0, continued in Philadelphia, San Francisco

  The room for Catholic worshipers at Athens airport.

The room for all other worshipers at Athens airport.

The re-booked flight had kosher food for me, but not the guy next to me who didn't think to ask for it (like me, he knows that airlines need 24 hours notice to supply kosher food, but apparently it doesn't hurt to ask even with only 8 hours notice). The flight was fine.

I watched The Way Way Back. A shy and awkward boy goes to some place for the summer with his sister, and his mom and her new boyfriend. He hates his mom's boyfriend, and he makes some unrealistic personal progress over the course of a few weeks. This is an unexceptional movie that doesn't have anything new to say. It was mild cliche entertainment, but not at all compelling. Like these movies do, it had a few ok scenes.

I interacted with four TSA agents at PHL. Number one was ok. She checked my passport and boarding pass and sent me to the disrobing line.

Number two put me on the side when I opted out of the porno-scanner. She called the third agent to come and process me. She was friendly.

Number three apparently didn't hear number two's call for pat down; after two minutes, I asked who we were waiting for and had to get number two to call number three again. Number three took my bags off of the X-ray machine conveyor belt and put them onto a different X-ray machine conveyor belt that was currently not in operation (so that my bags weren't holding up the line).  He then began reciting a legalese script about what he was going to do and with what part of his hand he would touch my niggly bits and do I have any sensitive parts, etc. When I interrupted him and said I was fine and he should just go ahead, he RAISED HIS VOICE, told me in douchebag mode (angry, aggressive, assertive, threatening) that if I did not let him finish, he would have to call other agents over to continue the procedure. I told him to go ahead and continue the script, and he started the spiel over from the beginning in loud douchebag voice. After he was done, including the chemical test for bomb residue, he walked away.

I began putting on my shoes and belt, etc, when TSA number four, suddenly noticing me from about ten feet away, RAISED HIS VOICE in douchebag mode and yelled at me that I CANNOT PUT MY ITEMS ONTO [second] X-ray machine conveyor belt and I must remove them immediately. While struggling with my belt, I started to say that I wasn't the one who put them there, but I didn't get out four words of this before he raised his voice EVEN LOUDER like a policeman about to shoot me and told me that I cannot place my items there and I had to get them off of there immediately. Wow.

You can find basic kosher items like drinks, nuts, fruit, and cookies in the Philli airport.

A moving K'nex sculpture at Philadelphia airport.

The flight to SFO was half empty. The captain came out and informed us that 4-5 people had to move from in front of the wing to behind the wing for the plane to be able to take off. [1] Then we would all have to move to the right side of the plane if the plane need to make a right turn. [2]

SF: As usual, I am still moving blindly through life when it comes to making good decisions. I decided to take the Shuttle service from SFO to my AirBnB place, because I was late and I thought it might be faster (and easier than navigating a train and a bus and some walking at this time of night). Mistake, I think. The guy drove no more than 25 miles an hour, usually less, and I was second to last one off. He also ignored the instructions given to him by his guidance system and the dispatcher (I saw him delete all of these from his little pad before starting) and then got lost and drove in many circles. It took an hour fifty to get to my place.

The AirBnB place, which was the cheapest place anywhere near the SF Ortho synagogue, appears to have been a fantastic win. The guy running it is a Korean guy (I think he runs it with his wife, too), and the place is awesome. All I needed was a clean bed. The place is clean, pretty, has it's own entrance, linens, TV and cable, fridge, breakfast, washing machine and dryer, Wi-Fi, etc. It's totally like a BnB. And did I mention cheap?

36 hours travelling. Tired boychick.

[1] This is true.

[2] This is not so true.

Day 0, continued in Greece

You might wonder why, on my flight from TLV to PHL to LAX to SFO I am posting a picture from the Athens international airport that says "Welcome to Greece".

Apparently, a number of people smelled fumes on the plane out of TLV and got sick, including the lovely Bahai girl sitting next to me on our unexpectedly short flight. She didn't throw up, but she felt close to doing so.

So we diverted to Greece and had to collect our luggage (I don't have any checked in) and rebook entirely new flights. We landed in Athens at 2:00, they let us off the plane at 2:45 (after emergency medical people dealt with some of the sick 'uns) and then we queued up at the US Airways ticket counter. By 5:00, about 10 people had successfully booked new tickets, with hundreds more waiting in line. I know they woke those two poor US Airlines people to come help us out, but 30 minutes per person is just a tad slow. No one has had any sleep or eaten since Israel.

Lucky for me, some woman in line called the US and re-booked her ticket directly with the US Airways ticketing office and then gave out the number to others to do the same (she even lent her phone to me to do this, since mine doesn't work here). So, while the line is still going and probably will until, oh, July, I am already re-booked. Another 15 minutes of cajoling the airport workers, and they also opened boarding lines for those of us who had re-booked, so we could get our boarding passes (US Airways won't open any lines until 3 hours before the flight; they can't check in luggage yet, but I don't have any haha). And we got a 15 EUR voucher for food (or, in my case, cans of coke I'm guessing).

My new tickets skip LA entirely and go straight to SFO from PHL, arriving 2 hours later than the original itinerary. So instead of 7 hours in LA, I now have 9 hours in Athens, but it's all in the airport. I was planning on buying a Ready SIM in LA, which is not available in SFO, so I'll need an alternative plan.

Vote now on Linux Game Awards for the PotM July 2014

You know the drill ;)

For those a bit slow: yes you can vote for multiple projects... So lets share the love a bit and not only focus on a single title (you know which one I mean).

Otherwise: If you have great ideas how the award could be made even better than it already is (yes we know, this time the nominations are a bit random), comment below.

Day 0: Destination San Francisco

And I'm off on another crazy trip. This time to SF for the GSummit gamification conference. I will be returning on June 15/16.

I'm flying into SF 6 days before the conference in order to recover from the jet lag; from experience, it is a waste of time for me to fly half way across the globe in order to sleep through a conference the next day.

I never really thought about visiting SF, so this is somewhat of a surprise to me. I have a few planned activities, and a few days where I'm just going to "explore". At the con, I hope to learn more about what real people do with gamification: how much business is going on, and how much is just hype. Theory is one thing; practice is another. I will attempt to report all of this to you, my faithful reader.

My first flight is a bit of a killer: TLV to PHL to LAX, 7 hour stopover, and then on to SFO.

Yehuda