The Doglion

Over recent months, the anger and resistance against the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) as well as the “Protect IP Act” (PIPA) has been growing and growing, and for good reason.

Many people understand that should these bills pass, the US government will basically have the legal means to censor the internet, under the pretense of fighting “online piracy”. Couple this with the recent “Occupy” civil movements all over America and the world, and you can see that this is really just another stunt that the establishment is pulling in order to keep itself in power. Because it is very, very clear: the internet is a crucial and powerful tool for people to organize themselves to bring revolutions upon the ruling class.  Read More

My final year in high-school

For the thousandth time, our math teacher recites the formula for finding the derivative of a function. Last night’s homework was to find the derivatives for 45 functions, and at this point, I’m really good at it. I have been doing this for one and a half years, with the goal of getting a good score in my national high-school graduation exams. I still don’t understand what the use of  this mythical derivative actually is. I once asked her, but she didn’t bother answering me. But it doesn’t matter. In a few months, I’ll be out of this place, and never have to find a god damn derivative again.

It’s weird. At the beginning of the year, and all throughout my previous year, the teachers have been warning us that this last year will be tough, and the exams at the end of it will determine how the rest of our lives will play out. A real turning point for each and every one of us. But here I am now, in my fourth period of the day, and I’m playing chess at the back of the class room. It’s now physics class, and our physics teacher is either drunk, or going to drink as soon as this period is over. His hand is shaking, and he’s chewing bubble gum. He’s wearing sun glasses in the class room. He’s the running joke among us students. But it’s okay, our grades won’t suffer. He already promised to give A’s to all of us without having to study for it. We just had to get him a bottle of vodka the other day. They tell us that this year is important for us, that we have to study hard, but I don’t give a shit, just like everybody else.

Fast forward to the end of the year. 

My friends and I are checking out each others grades. Funny, one of my buddies, who’s never really tried to study for any subject, and has been getting low grades for as long as I know him, has gotten so many A’s! It’s no surprise though. His grades are bought. It would make me upset if I actually gave a damn about grades. I mean, I studied much harder, and my grades aren’t as good. But I don’t give a shit, because at this point, I can’t take this education system seriously any more.

Fast forward to my first year in university

I’m now in the physics faculty in the national university of Mongolia. Being a freshman is funny. The schedule is chaotic, and nobody gives a shit if you even turn up for class. It’s winter, and I’m in the lecture hall trying to figure out what my professor is teaching us. I can’t focus though. It must be about -20 centigrade outside, and the poor state of the building means that the lecture hall is freezing cold as well. I can’t hold my pen calmly, because I’m shivering, and the other students around me are just like me. Well those that are here anyway, if they’re not sleeping. It’s a familiar feeling, to sit in a physics class with a drunk teacher. It’s 9.30 in the morning, and the guy is already drunk. *sigh*

——

These are some of my experiences of the Mongolian system in education. I didn’t even go to a public high-school. I went to a private school. One of the most expensive schools in Mongolia, in fact. It cost me $1000 per year at the time. I hear the prices went up to $3000 per year. If there is one lesson that is truly taught to kids in our schools, it’s that money can get you anything, and isn’t this the most important lesson that our kids should learn about life anyway? Seemingly EVERYTHING is up for sale in the real world, don’t you think?

——

Something is wrong with this system. How should we fix it? A few weeks ago, the teachers in the public schools went on strike to get higher salaries. Okay, let’s give them higher salaries. They’ll perform better if they didn’t have to be under constant financial stress, right?

No. Our education is fundamentally flawed. There is something wrong with it, and the problem goes fucking deep. It really isn’t just about the schools alone. It’s connected to everything else in society, but that would be too much to write about here. So let’s keep the focus on the schools.

What is the purpose of schools anyway? If you really look at it, it isn’t primarily to provide children with an education. The primary goal is to produce workers that can operate the industry of a country. Why do you think that mathematics and the natural sciences have a higher priority than the languages, and those are on the other hand ranked higher than the arts, such as dance, or drama. Why don’t we teach the children dance as often as we teach them maths? The establishment just doesn’t need people to pursue their own interests. They need people who work hard and don’t ask questions.

——

Do you remember the things you learned in biology in 8th grade? Chances are you don’t. You learned the material (probably just memorized it)  to get a good enough grade to pass the class, and forgot everything immediately afterward. Isn’t this a fucking waste of your and the teacher’s time? Ask yourself why you didn’t learn it. It’s because you didn’t give a shit. Which is fine, really. Wouldn’t it have been better for you then if you could have learned whatever thing you wanted? If you were interested in learning to play the drums, that’s what you really should have been doing then. Think about this: if you’re interested in it, you don’t have to be forced to learn it.

——

What we need is a system that is flexible enough to support and assist children to learn what ever they are interested in, when they are interested in it. This doesn’t mean more and more teachers. What we need to do is rethink the role of the teacher. What does the teacher really do? Most of the time it’s grading tests, and reciting the same lectures year after year. They’re broken records, and it doesn’t make them happy either, I betcha.

What we DON’T need is a grading system. Grades take away the focus of what education should be about, which is the self-improvement and growth of the student, the exploring and discovery of what we would like to be in the future. If you never tried acting, you don’t know if drama is your passion. Grades only serve to label children as stupid and smart, and put children under psychological pressure. I remember being so scared of showing my mother that I had a bad grade, that I didn’t show my grades in that subject to her for an entire year. Our teacher required the parents to sign the test papers of their children, and I faked mine. Where’s the good in that???

——

What we need is to humanize the class room. It’s stupid to put a bunch of 8-year-olds into a classroom, tell them to be quiet and pay attention to an increasingly stressed out teacher. We need children to interact with each other, to learn to work together and be active. Use this energy in a productive way. What about the lectures, you ask? Let’s replace the broken-record-teacher with an actual record, like a YouTube video. Let them watch the lecture as many times as they want, in the comfort of their own home. They don’t miss out on anything if they’re sick at home, and they don’t have to be embarrassed if they can’t quite follow. If something is really unclear, they can post a question underneath the video, and have it answered from one of millions of other students. This is not magic, guys!

——

There is a 7 year old girl, who uses “Khan Academy” regularly, watching whatever she wants. She actually likes learning, because all these stress factors you’d have in a traditional school simply aren’t there. She learned trigonometry. And understood it. Think about THAT. And she’s not a phenomenon. My sister, who didn’t understand chemistry for 3 years watched a 5 minute video about the elements and atoms. The first video in the chemistry playlist. She got it, for the first time, and was elevated. “Chemistry is actually so simple!”, she said. 3 years of chemistry classes, gone to waste right there……

——

This means that the role of the teacher must be fundamentally reinvented. Teachers aren’t the source of all the knowledge anymore. They should be the respected guide, a friend for the student. They can actually spend 100% of their time interacting with children, instead of coming up with or grading tests, or shouting at them to be quiet and pay attention. And children won’t have to be forced to learn something they aren’t interested in anyway. Let them find their own way, and they’ll amaze you with what heights they can reach.

——

This isn’t something I came up with myself by the way. Watch these videos:

Changing Education Paradigms

Do schools kill creativity?

Salman Khan at TED

So this has nothing to do with gaming.

Lately I’ve been looking into the Zeitgeist Movement again. If you read one of my older posts, you will know that I am in deep support of the movement and the values that it stands for. I felt like expressing some of my own observations and thoughts on the reality of living in Mongolia.

I’m constantly angry and frustrated about how things are here. If you live in Mongolia, and especially in the capital, you most likely feel this way too. There’s just too much to be pissed off about in this society. I will highlight a grievance at a time, but will try not to keep it not too whiny, but rather objective with some distance.

My sister studies in one of the most expensive high-schools in Mongolia. I won’t say which one because, well, she’s still studying and I don’t know what kind of consequences it could have for her if I named her school.

Anyway, so this school is so expensive, that by design, you have a high concentration of the richest kids of Mongolia in one single place. Those kids are brought up by their parents to be good at the capitalist game. These are kids who own the latest fancy gizmos like iPads, wear expensive clothes and get picked up and brought to school in Hummer trucks. They are  grotesquely disconnected from the general population, and often have the view that they’re better than other Mongolian kids.

Clearly this is a direct consequence of being raised by parents who mostly became rich after the communist breakdown, a time when society was in chaos. The introduction of the free market paradigm allowed the most opportunist people in Mongolia to quickly get rich, at the cost of other people. Basically, you have a bunch of assholes who got rich by fucking up others, which is the way the game is played. Get rich or die trying, etc.

You see, Mongolia is now a country with an extremely capitalist society. Politicians are businessmen who went for power to serve their own ends, rather out of a genuine desire to lead the country. There are lots of children of politicians in that school, too. And they will play the game the way they learned from their parents.

In that school, children are pressured to pursue their undergrad degrees in the most prestigious schools. They are brainwashed to believe that only in those schools they will be able to reach something. Only if you go to Harvard, or Yale, or another Ivy League School can you become anything of worth. Consequently, they look down upon Mongolian universities (which clearly aren’t that great in comparison), and the people who study there as the lower class. Oh what an embarrassment it would be to end up in a Mongolian uni!

Even average or less prestigious school in the US are out of the question for these kids. They are as snide and arrogant as their parents. It’s a mindset that they’ve grown up in, and it’s appalling. And the competition that takes place between them, it’s fucked up. Student A wants to apply to Harvard, and asks student B to proof-read her essay. Student B will see Student A as a direct competitor for her own prospects of getting into Harvard (as if there were limited places available for Mongolian students). Therefore, student B will actually change and sabotage the essay of student A. Then student C would see that A’s essay was sabotaged and tell her that. Student A will then look at student C and say: “You’re trying to backstab me!”. Where is the togetherness and cooperation? Mutual respect and trust? All fucking gone!

This happens in high-school for these kids already. The observations are:

• teenage kids will back-stab and betray each other for their own gains, even if the threat is only perceived
• they will think of themselves as ‘better’ and others as ‘lower’ people simply because they are richer. They think of themselves as the “Elite” of Mongolia, something that is hammered into their brains by the school itself
• kids who don’t like this environment are forced to either partake in it or be outcasted and they fall into depression, this petty subculture becomes their whole world. they just don’t know any better environment!
• the pressure applied on the kids by the school and their parents is ridiculous to begin with
• the behavior shown by these kids indicates that this is just the mirroring of the way their parents act, who are incidentally the people with money and power in Mongolia (politicians and/or business owners, etc)

Hello there. It’s been a long time since my last post. But now I feel like writing again. About “Breaking Bad”. I just watched the last episode of season 4 and felt like sharing some thoughts not just on the season, but on the series itself. There will be spoilers a plenty here, so go watch the show if you haven’t yet.

Breaking Bad is flawless, and it amazes me every time I watch it. The challenge with TV shows that feature a continuous narrative, as opposed to having separate plots for episodes (a la sit-coms like Friends etc),  is to keep the story tight and engaging. This is a tremendous ask for any writer. Every episode must be good on its own, and advance the narrative evenly, if not turn up the tension more than the last. There’s been shows that went out of steam at some points during their lifetime and it’s never a welcome thing. Events would happen that feel far-fetched and unnatural or like downright cheating on the writers part. It strains our suspension of disbelief. But not with Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. Read More

(This is my first “Gaming Diary” entry, where I just want to casually write about stuff I’m playing with some thoughts. I play older games on PC (I don’t have a strong rig, it’s a Dell Dimension 5000 from 2005) or on my PSP, where I can play older console games using emulators and of course PSP games.)

Been playing Resident Evil 2 (converted)

Back in the day, when Metal Gear Solid was all that mattered to me, when Final Fantasy 7 felt like an alternate world, there was a type of game I’d never been able to play. Survival Horror. There were a number of factors that put me off every time I tried playing a Resident Evil game. First of all, I hated the control scheme. A locked camera that looked cinematic, but felt impractical to no end, paired with a weird tank movement control scheme just felt so wrong. Add to this the constant tension that a zombie could come out and attack me from anywhere, and it was just unplayable. How the heck can I keep cool with such frustrating controls while having to stay alert almost all of the time? And then I heard from friends that you’d constantly be low on ammo and health. No thanks! Read More

I made a game! It’s a simple 2 Player game, where one player uses the mouse to control a fly flap, trying to catch the other player who controls the fly with the keyboard. The goal of the fly is to catch the bread crumbs flying around. For Fred to win, he must eat 5 bread crumbs, and can use a special power, a 2 second slow-motion to escape otherwise inevitable death-by-flyflap. Press X to use it.

Give it a try and tell me what you think! Read More

[This review contains spoilers, so don't even think of reading it if you plan to play i!t]

Portal 2 is a game that does everything right, but your experience can vary quite a lot depending on if you have played its predecessor before. Valve did really the best possible job anyone could have done on a sequel of a game that drew much of its acclaim from an innovative and quite genius feature.

I’m talking about the portal gun, of course, and if you have played Portal before, this game will not give you quite the same feeling of joy right from the start. Instead, you’ll feel happy to be back in Portal’s world, and intrigued to see the new things. There’s a fine balance here to strike, to ease new players into the game but also to give veterans new things to feast on. I find Valve did perfectly in almost every aspect. Read More

The first Portal was, and is, a very special game. I hadn’t known about it when it was released and only found out about it after my friends told me to give it a try. They said “It’s a really cute little puzzle game. You’ll be done quickly, but it’s worth it, and it doesn’t even require monster hardware!”. Needless to say, I gave it a try and sure enough, I was quite amazed by the brilliance of the portal gun and the gameplay that it offered. It’s a rarity these days, to start playing a video game and to just feel this pure joy of play. Portal was just…fun. Read More

Hi. So I’ve started learning Flashpunk back in August 2010, and immediately fell in love with it. It’s simple (compared to some other ways of game development), it’s Flash (so it can be played in the browser – platform independency FTW!) and there’s a great little community for it too. I’ve always dreamed of this ultimate RPG, where there would be vast lands to explore, thousands of fun things to do, and a real dynamic in the world that no RPG has ever had. Like many starting game developers, I immediately set out to work on that game. No time to lose! But alas, it is a long and windy road, and for all the motivation I have, it’s a real piece of work almost all the time. But I’m not writing this to complain. I forgot where I heard it, but this really hit home with me: “Making the game you really want to make is not a sprint, it’s a marathon” – I’m paraphrasing here as I don’t remember the exact words. Often I hear people say that when starting out, you should forget about that dream game you always wanted to make – at least until you have more experience.

Now, I’ve started writing this engine because ideally I want to use it to create that dream RPG of mine. If it turns out that it isn’t possible or too impractical in the long run, at least I’ll have learned enough so that I can make a new and better one. I’ve learned a ton of things, and it’s been a great experience. It’s not finished, and I intend to take it as far as I can. So where are we now? We have

1. A tile-based world composed of multiple maps with indoors and outdoor areas
2. Player character  movement with animations and stats
3. NPCs that can walk around using A* Pathfinding
4. Multiple-choice dialog with NPCs
5. An inventory, items, treasure chests
6. Enemies and turn-based combat

I find it hard to continue writing the engine without making sure that the features that are already there are robust. So I decided that at this point, I have enough features to actually start making a little RPG. I’m sure that in a real project, many of the problems with this engine will become more apparent to me, so that I can in turn improve on the engine.

I will not open-source this first game, but anything I learn from making it that can benefit the engine itself will get there, and the engine is open source. I’m going to write about the game itself, design-wise but also technical things and maybe, if I am confident enough, about a possible story. A little dev diary, innit cute?

In any case, it’s going to be a small, simple little RPG. I will try to put it in the 30min – 1h length of game play. If anybody has an interest in helping me out with art, that would be very appreciated. Sadly, I cannot pay for any work done, so it would all be voluntary work. If I am content with how the game turns out, I’ll put it up on a portal site, or maybe I’ll look into FlashGameLicense. Revenue there would be shared with collaborators, though the exact percentages are at this stage of course impossible to state. If you have any thoughts, suggestions or anything to say at all, the comments section is right down there. Okay then, see you!

Welkom terug! (that was dutch). Source code with assets HERE and a playable demo HERE. Read More