| After posting that, I ran into this, which I feel obligated to post: the most recent comment on the article, apparently from Alan Kay, 6/16/2017 (the article was published 01/2014). "A few corrections. (I was Chief Scientist of Atari at the time.) I told the TLC people that this was the greatest game concept that I'd ever seen (and still think so). I had loved Rocky's Boots and was really excited when Ann showed me the ideas for Robot Odyssey. What I told her -- and it's clear she misunderstood -- was that scaling up the Rocky's Boots approach missed the point of "robots" and "computers" (meaning that robots should have a "no ceiling" range of being "really capable") and that programming was invented for computers for a reason. I didn't say it couldn't be done -- I said it wouldn't work well enough for most potential users and players (and I believe that the sign they made was "Alan Kay says this won't work" (and if you think about it, it really didn't given what TLC was trying to do): (a) I was very sure that the UI ideas they had wouldn't scale gracefully, and (b) I was very sure that scaling logic up would quickly change the "bang per effort" ratio for the worse. What I tried to get TLC to understand was that using some higher level language e.g. "nicer Logo" for programming the robot brains would revolutionize game design and playing, and would make Robot Odyssey a big hit. After all these years I still think this is a wonderful concept, and is still waiting for the right designers and builders to marry the concept with the resources needed to make it great to use." |
Hi SJ --
Robot Odyssey is another game that would benefit from having a clean separation between the graphical/physical modeling simulation and the behavioral parts (both the games levels and the robot programming could be independently separated out) -- this would make a great target for those who would like to try their hand at game play and at robot behavioral programming systems.
This is a long undropped shoe for me. When I was the CS at Atari in 82-84, it was one of our goals to make a number of the very best games into frameworks for end-user (especially children's) creativity. Alas, Atari had quite a down turn towards the end of 83 ... We did get "the Aquarium" idea from Ann Marion to morph into the Vivarium project at Apple ... And some of the results there helped with the later Etoys design.
Cheers,
Alan
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From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:57:51 -0600 (CST) Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins, Chris Trottier, John Gilmore
Thanks SJ --
We are benefiting here from Don Hopkins' generosity (and of the original designers and owners of these games).
The basic notion is that there are many games that, if modularized with nice separable interfaces, would be great environments for exploring various kinds of "learning by doing". For example, there is a nice separation between the "rules/dynamics" of a games world and the "strategies/actions" of the characters. There could be a third separation to break out the graphics and sound routines as a media environment.
For example, in SimCity, the first and most useful breakout for children would be to allow various UIs to be made that would let children find out about and try experiments with the "city dynamics rules". It's not clear what the best forms for this would be, so it would be great to have a variety of different designers supply modules that would try to bridge the gaps to the child users.
This could work even for pretty young children (we helped the Open Magnet School set up Doreen Nelson's "City Building" curriculum in the third grade of the school and this was very successful -- a child controlled SimCity would have been wonderful to have).
Maybe this separation could be set up via the D-bus so that separate processes written in any language the authors choose could be used. This would open this game up to different experiments by different researchers to explore different kinds of UIs and strategy languages for various ages of children. I think this would be really cool! We would all learn a lot from this and the children would benefit greatly.
A trickier deal would be the world dynamics (I'm just guessing here, but Don would know). This is one of the really great things about SimCity -- it can really accommodate lots of different changes and stitch things together to make a pretty decent simulation without too many seams showing. (Given the machines this game originally ran on, many of the heuristics are likely to be a little patchy. Don has indicated as much.) I think doing a great world dynamics engine for games like SimCity would be really wonderful -- and could even be a thesis project or two.
Don has talked about doing the separations so that many new games can be made in addition to the variations.
Similarly, Robot Odyssey (one of the best games concepts ever) was marred by choosing a way to program the robots where the complexity of programming grew much faster than the functionality that could be given to the robots. This game was way ahead of its time.
Again, the idea would be do make a game in which environment, levels of challenge, and how the robots are programmed would be broken out into separate processes that a variety of gamers and researchers could do experiments in language and UI.
One of the most wonderful possibilities about this venture is that it will bring together very fluent designers from many worlds of computing (more worlds than usually combine to make a game) in the service of the children. We should really try to pull this off!
Cheers,
Alan