Call For Volunteers

IndieCade, The International Festival of Independent Games is looking for volunteers to help run their festival. The festival runs from October 1 - 4, 2009, in Culver City, CA.

For more information http://www.indiecade.com

To sign up to volunteer http://www.meetup.com/IndieCade-Volunteers

Game Difficulty Graphs:

CLICK TO VIEW GRAPHS:

The experience of playing a videogame if completely different than the experience of watching a movie. Here my History of Videogame students try to turn that experience into concrete data by making a graph of player strength vs game difficulty over the course of the game.

Subjective, yes, but often insightful. I find that the student created graphs of games that I have played make sense. I can see and often even feel the different high points of the game just by looking at the chart. See what you think.

Get You Game On

The International Festival of Independent Games is open for registraton: http://www.indiecade.com

Oct 1st - 4th Culver City

Another Trip Through the Art Files

Here is a rare piece from my collection. Steve Bessette pencils and Larry Loc inks. This was a left over design for a TSR plastic figurine. (Tim Truman was the art director on this project) The sculptures did not do the designs justice and they did not sell very well. I use to have a set of them but did not save them. I had fun inking a couple of the drawings that Bessette left with me.



Here is a cartoon of mine form the late 70s. As you can see it is a twist on the popular Twilight Zone. It plays to my past as a chef.

TV Blast Revisited

Comment from Ernie Pasanen on the TV Art Piece, piece.

Ah, the TV.

That TV graced my workshop/office for many years. I put it in storage after the "incident".

I came home one night late. The house was empty, and as I was changing my clothes, I smelt something burning.

I walked about sniffing, and as I approached my work area, the smell got stronger, and I could hear a faint, 60 cycle hum.

I walked into my workshop, and found the TV. It was plugged in, and powered up. The smokey smell was coming from it. I touched the plug wire, and it was almost too hot to touch. I pulled the plug, and took the TV off the wall.

The rheostat coil was glowing red! (love the word rheostat. Potentiometer is so lame) It had burned the insulation it was wrapped around. Some of the insulation on the surrounding wires had melted away.

So I let it cool. When my son arrived home (he was age 13 at the time) I asked him how the TV came to be on.

After a lot of hemming and hawing I found out that he and his friends had come over that afternoon, and plugged the TV in and started pushing the buttons.

Well, I'll freely admit, that TV is just so damn touchable! It dares you to push its button! You just gotta. Lets face it. My sons generation never had to actually touch a TV. They were always safely sequestered behind a remote control. They never had to turn a "dial" ("Don't touch that dial!") that broke off after a year or so, and need pliers or the jury rig needed to keep the knob on.

So they touched it. A lot. And moved the knife switch. And then left it powered on and left the house.

Now, I know we both know that we shared an view that devices like fuses and circuit breakers are such elitist and intrusive things. I remember that in 1981 ("mostly a bad year") we built FMEH (A talking head, mounted in a glass display case located on 8th avenue and 53 street in New York City) and mounted very expensive (at the time) LED's on the keyboard. I remember spending about 6 hours lovingly hand wiring the whole thing, and then watched them explode like a chain of firecrackers, because of the lack of a 5 cent fuse.

Good times, Good times.

Anyway, I plugged the TV back in after an hour, and it did nothing. I figured it was grilled. I unplugged it, and went to bed.

The next day, I plugged it an again. It worked! It took 24 hours, but it healed itself! Lord knows (cat's name) that I wouldn't want to try an fix it. I never really figured out why it works at all.

I wrapped it up and put it in storage, along with the 12 gauge shotgun and other stuff "youngin's shouldn't get in to. Of course, now my son is 22 years old, and in a masters program. I guess I can afford to bring it back out again.

22 years old. That's how old I was when I stepped forth from the hallowed halls of Kubie U. Now, where did I leave my walker...

Soapbox: Give the Artist His due

A lot of non-artist types like to talk about God-given artistic talent. Like it is a Cracker Jaks prize that they missed out on. It is a major cop out that turns all the pains taking years of hard work the artist spends learning the craft into some kind of divine lottery.

Artist spend more time then doctors learning the craft. Or the great ones do. We start at an earlier age and keep working years longer. But still all our work is blown off as the luck of the cosmic draw.

Here is a case in point. Up front I will admit that I was madly jealous of the work of John Totleben when I first met him age 19 going on renaissance master. Here is a sketch of John`s that I found in my resent journeys though my archives.


Click for enlarged view:

John would come over to my studio in Dover and hang out. I had lots of these end paper drawing pads laying around that were given to me by another K.B. student who worked for a printer. John was always drawing, always, always drawing. I must have 40 or 50 of these sketches that he left behind. I remember driving down highway 41 with John riding shotgun and he was inking a drawing in his sketchbook using a Shaffer pen filled with India ink.

God given talent my ass. This is hundreds and hundreds of thousands of hours of hard work on top of an aptitude that I am, yes, willing to give some heavenly credit. But without all the work, nothing. Oh you`re so lucky to have that God-given talent.

TV Art Blast From the Past

I have been hunting through the stacks of late. Artists end up with lots of old portfolios that get stuffed (not always in the English sense) with lots and lots of old papers and photos and the like.

The reason for the hunt is unimportant to you the reader. The flotsam and Jetsam of the search may be of some interest. I just ran onto a photo of an art piece I did my first year at the Kubert School. This is the piece that got the interest on my future partner, Ernie Pasanen.

The frame was the front of a wood cabinet TV set. The painting in a POV from a monster`s mouth through the lips and teeth out into a Ditko/Lovecraft madness. To add to the madness the painting is flopped 90 degrees.

The control knobs have been replaced by 3 push buttons and 3 lights. The speaker is wired direct to a rheostat coil soldered at different points on the coil so three different tunes of raw electric static erupt from the tortured tinny speaker.

There is a polyester resin casting of a translucent naked blue hag with a bright red giant tongue. There are lights in both her breasts and in her giant red tongue. Each was wired into one of the sound buttons.

When Ernie (later one of the architects of the ARPNET and the on site consultant to the Princeton Super Computer Group) looked at the wiring he was blown away with the comment that it was brilliant in its primitive approach and that he knew too much about electronics to ever be able to do anything matching it.

On the top of the TV console is a cigarette burn and a half-smoked cigarette. The cigarette and ash was soaked in polyester resin and then repainted to look like a cigarette and ash. I had to repaint it every so often because people would try to brush it off the TV and would rip up their hands and leave blood on the resin ash which was sharp as a obsidian razor.

I created this piece during my first summer in Dover. I came early to school and rented a giant second floor walk-up studio and worked in a restaurant. I got Rick Grime a job as a dishwasher in the same hellhole.

Early in the first year I brought the TV piece in to the Kubert School and plugged it in at the bottom of the stairs. All day long there was the constant music of the tortured speaker with raw electricity erupting in pain. Fittingly this piece in now in the collection of Ernie Pasanen and all I have is this photo.

Games, Reports & Exposing Myself to Literature

I love teaching at LCAD (Laguna College of Art & Design). Last week I had my first History of Videogames class. We went over the syllabus and the upcoming assignments. There is a report due on week 4. Today I got the first report submitted a good 3 weeks early. That never happens at any of the other colleges.








I am proud of the design of this report. It is not your normal research, steal and plagiarism project. The student has to graph a lot of information on a game that they have played and won. The coolest part is the Strength vs Difficulty chart. You can get a real feel for the game play at a single glance.



Speaking of gaming. IndieCade is coming. It is Thursday October 1 to Sunday October 4, 2009, Culver City (Los Angeles), California.

IndieCade is open to the public and draws a diverse audience of savvy professionals interested in cutting-edge digital media, game developers, publishers, artists, and enthusiasts of all ages.
2009 Festival Highlights include:

Hands-On Exhibition: A hands-on exhibition of the top finalist work which will be showcased in multiple gallery locations across downtown Culver City.

Conference, Workshops, Panels, & More: A robust conference, salons, workshops, panels and keynote by industry leaders, thinkers, and featured gamemakers presentations will be held throughout the festival with specific sessions catering to industry professionals, aspiring gamemakers, and fans. Speakers include Keita Takahashi (Katamari Damacy, Nobi Nobi Boy), Henry Jenkins, Brenda Brathwaite and more. http://www.indiecade.com

It is $20 for a day pass, $50 for all 4 day and $150 for the seminars, panels and solons (prices are online before the conference opens).



I was looking through old portfolios last week trying to find some stuff for Seth Estrada, which I did not find. But I did find this from mid to late stud muffin dazes when I was just out of the Kubert School. Behind me is the wall with painting by a number of the KBU students. The Concentration Moon is by Steve Bissette my old KB School roommate.