Really cool, I remember using this on a friend's computer in the early 90s. My only complaint is this has a smoothing alpha edge on the pencil and line tools, which gives that unfortunate white outline when using the paint bucket. KidPix is great, but gimmie that classic Nearest Neighbour behaviour.
It appears because the underlying HTML5 Canvas tools are being used, things like antialiasing are unavoidable without remaking certain API calls. I'm sure it could be done though!
This rabbit hole is a waste of time, as someone who's been down it, you'll find piles of resources claiming CSS and JS flags will give you what you want but it never really gets there.
The only way to actually get true aliased brushes in canvas is implementing a line drawing algorithm manually and drawing down aliased circles like how https://gifpaint.com/ & https://jspaint.app/ do it.
I've never used the original so this might be a faithful reproduction of the original (it's kind of cool), but it looks like the line tool and the multicoloured tool interact weirdly, and it doesn't erase the previous line when you move the mouse, instead you get a cool fan of colour instead. I was expecting a single line, but had more fun with it as it is, which is why I suspect it might not actually be a bug after all.
It's possible to avoid this issue. I implemented a Canvas based clone of the classic MS Paint back in the days. One of the tricks to avoid this, was to use decimal pixel coordinates, so instead of drawing a pixel at (100, 200), you would draw at (100.5, 200.5).
That's not a complete solution. For instance, it assumes that each canvas pixel corresponds to a single logical pixel, and that each logical pixel corresponds to a single physical pixel. There are a number of reasons that might not be true.
Craig Hickman was my Prof at UofO. Took his Digital Arts class in 1986 for one quarter and wrote an early proto color paint program inspired by MacPaint, on a Graphics Frame Store system that uses serial port to communicate with a Mac 128K.
The system had basic graphics primitives built-in and the system drew the images based on the commands received. Forgot the name of said graphics frame store, which if I recall had 8-bit color and had "Vector" as part of it's name (though it uses raster CRT with bit maps and not vector displays).
Craig was an early pioneer in using computer color graphics for Art.
Nice. Thank you. Craig is a wonderful and generous guy, and a great teacher/professor. He noticed that I was looking to learn as much as I can about graphics programming (I was doing Comp Sci) and gave me access to some neat toys, including an Apollo Domain.
The web app somehow made its way to him! He sent me an extremely endearing message that it was fun to see his 2yo grandson using it! (Craig had originally made Kid Pix for his son who is now a graphic, ui, and ux designer). I let him know I made this port for my own daughter as a pandemic-project.
This isn't just good for nostalgia. My 10 year old has really enjoyed playing with it for years now. She hadn't even realised it was so old until I told her recently. Stuff like Stardew Valley means kids are used to the 8-bit style and don't think of it as a signifier of old games.
Yeah. It's truly amazing how cleverly they designed these tools to encourage discovery and experimentation. It's made to make it basically impossible to create something that "doesn't look right", which makes it a fantastic creativity toy for children.
It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything today that can compete with what I played with as a kid thirty years ago.
> It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything today that can compete with what I played with as a kid thirty years ago.
My wife is a teacher. I came home from work and she was making Google slides and the stock art was just like KidPix. I suspect that Google slides is the spiritual successor, but it just isn't as fun.
> It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything today that can compete with what I played with as a kid thirty years ago.
My kids are always shocked when I dig up some old software that does X or Y that they would otherwise need the pro enterprise AI plus subscription to use through the browser.
>I really enjoyed Meeting Mr. Kid Pix by jeffrey aka Whistlegraph on Twitter. I appreciated the sincerity of both him and Craig Hickman. So nice to see people putting effort to understand + be understood.
>This does touch on something I've tried to nail down before in regard to creative tools and video games.
>If Kid Pix is so delightful (it is) what does it mean that it is a delightful paint program? Rather than a delightful video game?
>Even if the produced image isn't the point, that you're manipulating an image is some part of it. That you see images all around you and now you're enjoying making them. It's got to be (I think) something to do with feeling agency. Video games give you agency too, but with a closed world (that's oversimplifying).
>I can't fully articulate it! But it seems useful to keep returning to.
Too bad it's totally fucked up on android mobile, I'm stuck in the top left quartile.
This has all the 90s vibes which I absolutely ADORE! Awesome sounds and UX. The nostalgia is almost too much, it was a uniquely raw and badass time to be a kid in the 90s.
The visual references in that video were great. The Steve Jobs took me by surprise, I thought of tech titans being culturally relevant was a distinctly recent phenomenon, but of course 99 was the peak of the dot-com bubble and Apple was huge already.
The Sims reference (https://youtu.be/6-v1b9waHWY?t=112) was slightly anachronistic since it was released in early 2000 (and it's really weird to see the idealized hires vector graphics reto-re-rendering of a lores pixelated game), but the dancing baby was spot on.
The dancing baby (https://youtu.be/6-v1b9waHWY?t=124) was from a demo that shipped with 3D Studio Max's "Character Studio / Bipid / Physique" character animation and skinning system, which we used to make the character animation in The Sims. The baby and its dancing animations were included with Character Studio as a canned demo, along with some other animations you could apply to any skeleton.
Believe it or not, there is a Kid Pix 5.0, and it even runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs. Inexplicably though, the company that develops it refuses to advertise it. Maybe it has something to do with their school contracts. You can grab a copy on Internet Archive though.
So amazing. I remember we used to go to our school's computer lab in ~1999 when we used to draw on Kidpix. And I vividly remember the Firecracker feature with nice bomb sound. You have left me nostalgiac :)
I remember the sounds so much better than the tools. I still can hear perfectly every slice of the exquisite corpse ‘draw me’ feature: “I’m a … beautiful fairy princess … with a hundred toes and a pickle in my nose … and … I’m covered with feathers!!”
https://tuxpaint.org TuxPaint is an app that is very similar from 2002 onwards to current. I have been installing on many computers for small children since. Stamps and noises are the most loved features.
TuxPaint is just as fun for adult artists, especially using a stylus touchscreen. The Magic tools have unique digital-grunge effects that a more respectable paint program won’t have (my favorite is Chalk). I only recommend replacing the stock colors with something like Dawnbringer’s 16- or 32-color palette.
Does anyone else remember the clone Art for Kids for Atari [1], or more specifically, it's Polish version for Windows, Zostań Małym Picasso? There's no screenshot I could find of the latter, but looked exactly like the Atari clone. Now, KidPix unlocked tons of memories, have never played it, but TIL it's the original.
That's neat! Although the first version was before my time. I had Kid Pix Deluxe 3 in elementary school, and eventually got my family to get it. Had to run it on our Windows ME computer since it crashed trying to run it on XP.
(Crazy story how we even got a copy... I used to go and stare at the product page for Kid Pix Deluxe 3X, a remastered version for Mac, since it was the closest thing I could find to a source for the one I knew of. One day, my parents got an email from some company offering the original Deluxe 3 version for something like $40. Looking back on it, I have no clue how they got my parents' email address or if they were in any way associated with Brøderbund, and it was probably unsafe to give them payment info... but we actually got the software and I don't think the credit card was ever abused, so all's well that ends well.)
It's incredible, really. I haven't heard these in 25+ years and yet recognize them immediately. Probably because I heard them repeated 50 million times!
So, sometimes software gets these things called "iterations" and "versions" where the authors of the software add features and updates. So while this link isn't the KidPix of the 90s, it certainly has the same gameplay to the point where Im personally transported back to playing this on my Dad's Mactinosh 30ish years ago.
Perhaps you can try downloading it and seeing for yourself?
Maybe a few months ago I got a real hankering for the sounds of KidPix. The theme song is 100% pure lab grade nostalgia for me. Pretty sure I never used the program to its full extent but I loved the funny sound effects.
[Editing because I commented before clicking the link. Seems this is some older version. I only used a newer one.]
I don't remember a theme song from the version of my childhood, but I vividly remember the OH NO! of the undo button (which is, delightfully, included in the web version).
I used to use kidpix 4 as a kid and recently went and set up a windows XP VM to try it again. Turns out I pretty much was using it to its full extent by just making a mess and blowing stuff up.
It’s pretty much impossible to create anything artistic in the program. The lack of layers, zoom, and only one level of undo make it extremely difficult. I have somewhat good drawing skills but wasn’t able to do anything more than a very crude stick figure. Still had a lot of fun doing that though.
In a way I appreciate knowing that I didn't miss out on much. I vaguely recall something about animation though? Other than that, I guess that's what I remember too. Just splattering stuff on the screen to hear the funny noises and making nightmare drawings. I'm sure my parents still have some printouts. I recall a bowling ball and pin brush I liked.
Love it. I'm curious, anyone know how this was implemented? Is it a webassembly port of the original kidpix code or did he code it up from scratch via JS?
At my elementary / Jr high school we had one Apple II in each classroom, which was fun to play Oregon trail and number munchers on. The 'computer lab' had a bunch of IIgs (color! woo!) and Macs, allowing one class at a time to come in for an hour or so. Usually it was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, ClarisWorks (word), some LOGO programming application, and KidPix.
KidPix was the big hit, it got everyone into the joy of computing, it tought kids how to save files, use disks, make copies, and it kept the ImageWriter color dot matrix printer buzzing for the whole hour.
The "oh no" undo sound gives me so much joy. Thanks to whoever did this.
Recently I found one of my old elementary school projects from ~1995 or so, where we had to make our own magazine, and my friend/classmate and I made a computer gaming magazine. We used Kid Pix to draw a side view of our own imagined Command & Conquer scene to act as a "screenshot" in our article about the game. Since the Mac lab at school had a color printer (the ImageWriter II, I think), we were able to make some pretty neat pages for our magazine! Fun memories :)
Oh, actually I think I found the floppy disk that had that very Kid Pix document on it, now that I think of it! Probably one of the oldest of my creations that I still have.
Sweet, found the files I backed up off the old floppies a while back. Here's the most ambitious thing I ever made in Kid Pix, for the made-up Command & Conquer "game screenshot" in our "make a magazine" assignment! I believe it was in 1994 or 1995, on a Color Classic (as that is what our computer lab had a ton of at the time). This was a lot of work for a 9 or 10 year old! haha
The audio is the biggest memory blast for me. That low quality flash-style audio is just so nostalgic. Does anyone know what specifically causes that? Is that just due to audio codecs at the time?
AFAICT, Kid Pix was first released as public domain in 1989, and published a year or two later by Broderbund.
We don't think much about it these days when buying and using a quarter-terabyte MicroSD card is rather passe, and when we can buy a complete USB sound card for ~$5 at Wal-Mart (we call it a "USB C headphone adapter" and it acts just like we'd expect a dumb adapter to act, but it's got the whole works integrated completely inside of the connector shell -- ADC, DAC, power amp, ...).
Back then, audio was... problematic. It was unwieldy. At 16-bit stereo 44.1KHz ("CD quality"), a 5.25" double-density disk can hold less than two seconds of audio, and we didn't have the computational grunt for perceptive codecs like MP3.
So we just used less of it: We sampled with fewer bits, and we did so less-often.
A combination of low sample rate and primitive ADC implementations with not-so-good Nyquist filtering and other issues lead to both a chopped off top end, and a mess of sampling artifacts in an easily-audible range.
A low sample depth lead to analog sounds being recorded as hot as possible -- often with deliberate clipping -- lest there be even fewer bits to contain the important parts of the sounds. Some of this could be mitigated with high-quality dynamic range compression, but good outboard compressors were expensive (and so were the 16-bit workflows that would allow that to be done digitally in software). It was a sea of tradeoffs.
Further digital processing also had a bad effect on stuff (quantization errors, oh my!) -- somewhat akin to doing things like trying to scale the resolution of ASCII art.
And even then, sometimes the audio was too big. So we'd truncate samples by just chopping off LSBs until the sounds were barely-useful even in a chonky fun drawing program (the original disksets from the SoundBlaster card came with "compression" software that did exactly this), just to make things a wee bit smaller because storage was relatively tiny.
This was how we got the sounds of the early-ish days of PCM audio on home computers, and much of that carried on into the early flash days (due to bandwidth constraints, not so much storage; CD-ROMs had broadly fixed the storage problem for commercially-published software by then).
I don't know exactly how the kidpix sounds were programmed, but I'll bet flash was light-years beyond it. Flash used wav, QuickTime, real Media, and other audio files that were probably made using a DAW or real instruments like they are today, dropped into a wysiwyg Editor. They were usually highly compressed so they could be usable to people on slow dial-up connections which is where that crunchiness comes. In a lot of earlier applications with sound, such as games, the sounds were programmed in assembly using tone and noise generators. It was super fast and lightweight, but obviously one of the first older techniques to get left behind when it was feasible.
(random thought that popped into my head that might be interesting if you like this stuff-- there are lots of gui options for making tones and noise and I personally think it's super fun to explore these sounds.)
Is there a way to adjust the canvas size? The workable area stretches beyond my laptop screen and I have to scroll... some of the tools work slower doing their patterns when the canvas is this large.
(I'm on Firefox's latest release, I've whitelisted their JS in noscript and even tried opening a private browsing window where uBlock is disabled in case some of the privacy stuff is interfering w/ rendering)
But other than that cool work, it's really bringing me back to elementary/early middle school days... I wish I had some of the abstract art I'd create sitting waiting for the bus, but alongside sim cities and old essays it's gone with the (digital) wind...
Man, I used to spend hours on KidPix back on my old 68k mac. It's not quite the same, and a lot of the effects are not 1:1, but it's still a cool throwback.
Reminds me of the hours I spent messing around on Tux Paint. For some reason, the canvas is rendering to the right of the top toolbar instead of below it (Firefox stable).
Not to diminish the groundbreaking originality KidPix (1989), but rather to highlight something from a few years later in the same vein that it might have inspired, I also love the Thinkin' Things series from Edmark (1993):
>Thinkin' Things is a series of educational video games by the Edmark Corporation and released for Windows and Mac in the 1990s. Entries in the series include Thinkin' Things Collection 1 (Formerly Thinkin Things) (1993), Thinkin' Things Collection 2 (1994), Thinkin' Things Collection 3 (1995), the adventure game Thinkin' Things: Sky Island Mysteries (1998), Thinkin’ Things Galactic Brain Benders (1999), Thinkin' Things: All Around Frippletown (1999) and Thinkin' Things: Toony the Loon's Lagoon (1999).
>The Thinkin' Things series allows players to experiment and explore with interactive objects in different ways and methods throughout the games. This can be in the form of playing with shapes, patterns, motions, sound effects and music tunes. Every game has its own preset designs and demonstrations to give the player an idea of how the game works before the player can customize a design of their own. Some games also permit the player to record their own sounds with a microphone.
Alan Kay also loves Thinkin' Things (as well as Warren Robinett's "Rocky's Boots" and "Robot Odyssey", the same guy who made Atari Adventure), and cited one of its levels, a football halftime parade programming system, as a precursor to blocks-based visual programming:
DonHopkins on June 29, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available on...
From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:55:27 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins, Chris Trottier, John Gilmore
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
pjungwir on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | next [–]
Does anyone here remember ZZT? I loved building puzzles in that game with the scripting language. You didn't program to play, but you could make your own games and program the behavior of special objects. It's the closest realized example I can think of to what Alan described here.
jasonjayr on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | next [–]
I remember ZZT -- and the excitement when I found an archive of alternate worlds I could download from a BBS. Learning to program ZZT worlds was one of the first steps I took to programming.
DonHopkins on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | prev | next [–]
I'm not familiar with ZZT, but here's a reference to another game that inspired Alan Kay, called "Thinkin' Things", in a discussion about the Snap! visual programming language!
From: Alan Kay Date: Thu, 3 May 2018 07:49:16 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)
Yes, all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one I designed for Etoys* more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk.
I'd advise coming up with a special kid's oriented language for your SimCity/Metropolis system and then render it in "blocks".
Cheers
Alan
------------- * Two precursors for DnD programming were in my grad student's -- Mike Travers -- MIT thesis (not quite the same idea), and in the "Thinking Things" parade programming system (again, just individual symbol blocks rather than expressions).
----
From: Don Hopkins Date: Fri, 4 May 2018 00:43:56 +0200 Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)
I love fondly remember and love Thinkin’ Things 1, but I never saw the subsequent versions!
That would be a great way to program SimCity builder “agents” like the bulldozer and road layer, as well as agents like PacMan who know how to follow roads and eat traffic!
I am trying to get my head around Snap by playing around with it and watching Jens’s youtube videos, and it’s dawning on me that that it’s full blown undiluted Scheme with continuations and visual macros plus the best ideas of Squeak! The concept of putting a “ring” around blocks to make them a first class function, and being able to define your own custom blocks that take bodies of block code as parameters like real Lisp macros is brilliant! That is what I’ve been dreaming about and wondering how to do for so long! Looks like he nailed it! ;)
Here’s something I found that you wrote about tile programming six years ago.
Etoys, Alice and tile programming ajbn at cin.ufpe.br () 6 years ago
Folks,
I have been trying the new version of Alice <www.alice.org>. It also uses tile programming like Etoys. Just for curiosity, does anyone know the history of Tile Programming? TIA,
Antonio Barros PhD Student Informatics Center Federal University of Pernambuco Brazil
Alan Kay 6 years ago
This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in the CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set). This project was basically about being able to march around a football field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a very simple tile based programming system. Also, a grad student from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents -- the system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs in Mike's very powerful system.
The etoys originated as a design I did to make a nice constructive environment for the internet -- the Disney Family.com site -- in which small projects could make by parents and kids working together. SqC made the etoys ideas work, and Kim Rose and teacher BJ Conn decided to see how they would work in a classroom. I thought the etoys lacked too many features to be really good in a classroom, but I was wrong. The small number of features and the ease of use turned out to be real virtues.
We've been friends with Randy Pausch for a long time and have had a number of outstanding interns from his group at CMU over the years. For example, Jeff Pierce (now a prof at GaTech) did SqueakAlice working with Andreas Raab to tie it to Andreas' Balloon3D. Randy's group got interested in the etoys tile scripting and did a very nice variant (it's rather different from etoys, and maybe better).
> all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one I designed for Etoys more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk.
I was curious about this TED talk, and found the part where he demonstrates Etoys in the section called "Personal Computing & Children Today".
The way he interacts with a running program, moving statements around and editing them, observing the values of variables as they change.. It's really an ancestor of Snap, and I can see its influence on Bret Victor's talks like Inventing on Principle.
---
Mike Travers' thesis, "Agar: An Animal Construction Kit" is an entertaining and thought-provoking read.
> An animal construction kit is an interactive computer system that allows novice programmers to assemble artificial animals from simple components. These components include sensors, muscles or other effectors, and computational elements. They can also include body parts such as limbs, bones, and joints. A complete animal construction kit must also provide a world for the animal to live in, and must support the co-existence of multiple animals of different species.
It reminds me of the book, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. It's about modelling a world of autonomous agents with sensors and actuators, motivations and behaviors.
(EDIT: This book is listed in the bibliography of the thesis, so it is a kind of precursor.)
---
> ..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".
> ..I'd advise coming up with a special kid's oriented language for your SimCity/Metropolis system and then render it in "blocks".
This is an intriguing idea, especially now that SimCity's world dynamics engine has been separated and compiled to WebAssembly. It will allow different views and interfaces with the underlying data, events, actions.
> it’s dawning on me that [Snap] is a full blown undiluted Scheme with continuations and visual macros plus the best ideas of Squeak!
That's lovely too, it makes sense that a visual programming language that evaluates tree-structured blocks will naturally correspond to a Lisp.
So it seems these ideas are pointing toward a visual Lisp environment that allows programming robots and interacting with a living model of a city/world.
I'm in the very early process of integrating Snap! with Micropolis (open source SimCity), so you will be able to do all that stuff Alan Kay and Brett Victor talk about. The Snap window is off the left side of the screen, and you can drag it over the map. I just snapped it in last night but haven't hooked it up to the simulator yet, that's what I'm working on now:
It also has a cellular automata machine simulator ("Space Inventory") that you can toggle by pressing the space bar. Thanks to HN user lioeters's PR, we've also just added 8 alternative tile sets that you can switch between with the - and = keys! Once I've hooked up the city drawing tools, they will also let you draw into the live or paused cellular automata tiles, and even unleash disasters like tornadoes and monsters and earthquakes on the abstract tile patterns, that draw into the tiles themselves, so you can play with the tile map like KidPix!
An example of what I mean about KidPix drawing with SimCity tiles (without the drawing tools hooked up yet, really just a cellular celebration of the newly added tile sets):
>Circuit bending is the creative, chance-based customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low-voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators.
>Emphasizing spontaneity and randomness, the techniques of circuit bending have been commonly associated with noise music, though many more conventional contemporary musicians and musical groups have been known to experiment with "bent" instruments. Circuit bending usually involves dismantling the machine and adding components such as switches and potentiometers that alter the circuit.
Will mentions Braitenberg machines in his 1996 talk, "Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26", in response to questions a student asked about modeling interpersonal interaction and I asked about storytelling:
What about from person to person, you talking about the information that's contained within the objects, so there can be information in another person, that you want to interact with in the environment.
Have you looked at any reasons why you would want to do that?
Will Wright:
Oh yeah, I mean, that's that's the hard problem.
I mean, simulating ants is hard enough, when you get to people there's really no hope.
There are two issues here.
You can look at this as a technology.
It's not a product right now.
And their are a few directions this could go.
I could see this becoming, let's say, a multiplayer network MUD kind of a thing.
You might have a thousand people playing SimCity from the bottom up, each person building their own house in a big multi-user space.
In which case that issue is a little less important, because most of the people are real people, and you're dealing with puppets.
As a standalone game, which is probably our our closer target, we have to deal with the problem you're bringing up, which is how do we deal with people to people?
And it's hard, I mean there's just -- I'm sure Terry can elaborate on that more than I can.
But the best thing we can do is prop up a convincing illusion.
We don't have to be doing a valid simulation of human personality.
What we have to do is we have to put up something that's ambiguous enough to where somebody can read in what they want.
Actually in this thing what I have right now are people come up and they converse, but you don't hear what they're saying, they just gesture, and sometimes they look mad, sometimes they kind of look contemplative.
It's kind of interesting how much people will read into that.
This is kind of dynamic that we've seen again and again where something happens in SimCity and they said "oh I was running my nuclear reactor near the red line, and then there was so much smoke coming out of it, this plane crashed, and because of that, this and that happened", and they'll describe this long causal chain of events that I know does not exist.
I designed the simulation, I know that there's no linkage between the power output of the power plant, the planes crashing, but they're convinced it exists.
Don Hopkins:
They're using it as a medium to tell stories about.
Will Wright:
Yeah!
Don Hopkins:
Where they're using it as a piece of paper, to write.
Will Wright:
Yeah, that's exactly right.
There's a parallel simulation going on here in the game.
Everybody's taking a linear path through this, and they're basically, most people will attempt to understand things like this with a story.
They'll think about "I did this, then that happened, because of that", and so the story becomes kind of their logical connection, their logical reverse engineering, of the simulation that they're playing inside of.
Now on the people's side, I think we can do a lot in this as a product, by propping up that illusion of people.
Again, if this is a doll house, we don't want the dolls to be sentient things.
We want the dolls to be interesting enough to where I can play games with them.
There was actually a really interesting doll that this company came out with.
Oh, it was Worlds of Wonder, this really cool doll, I've got a couple of them after they went out of business.
It's called the Julie doll.
But it was like this $250 doll with voice recognition, and it said all these things.
It had just a huge amount of ROM with digitized speech in it, and so it would sit there and try and have stupid conversations with you.
And really it was kind of Eliza, or had keywords it would recognize, and give you these kind of non-committal responses.
But in the testing of that, well first of all it was a $300 doll.
Who's going to buy the kid a $300 doll?
So it was really more, it was actually the only doll I've ever seen that appealed to grown men.
Grown men love this, I mean this is a hacker's doll.
But I talked to the guy who was working this project, and he said they put this in focus groups with girls.
And they played with it for a while, and then after about a half an hour they take the batteries out, and keep playing with it.
And what was happening is that the girls were propping up this elaborate fantasy in their play, and the dolls were supposed to be a structure for that fantasy, they weren't supposed to be the fantasy.
The doll was telling them what the fantasy was, and it was conflicting with what the girls were saying, and so it was interfering actively with their fantasy and their play.
So in that regard, I think we can actually kind of take that path with these people.
And all we have to do is deal with them at a very local kind of a state machine, Braitenberg Machine kind of level, and say that they're angry, and they're hungry, and they're sleepy.
And then we can actually do some things where maybe they have a little, what you might call, structural ambiguity about what they're actually saying.
One of the thoughts I had about this project in particular is that you'd see the people go up and they talk, and there would be some kind of a flavor to their conversation, but it would be more like Peanuts.
When they did the TV show of Peanuts, you'd hear the adults talking, and the adults would always be like "mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa", or soft, or loud.
You can tell if they're mad, or angry, or what, but you wouldn't hear what they were saying.
You'd have to read that into it.
I think this is the area where we sidestep the issue, just because as a commercial company we have to ship a game, we're not doing a research project.
What I see is people enjoying that they all remember the same thing, not claiming they are atomic or special. (Not that I see why people feeling special would be a problem, anyway.)
