A Visit with Michael Stenmark

Enhörna, Sweden

Michael Stenmark was one of my very first clients when I started consulting, and brought me up to Stockholm to visit his company, Hidden Dinosaur. A lot has changed for both of us since then, but we're still in touch. He's one of the most creative people I've ever met.

After I got done on Gotland I had a day free, so I went to spend the night at his amazing house in the country. I don't know if Michael is a big hit with women or not, but he ought to be: this is his guest bedroom, a wildly romantic confection of an antique Indian bedstead, cloth-of-gold pillows, draperies galore, and a big fuzzy tiger. The house is full of plants and candles everywhere, and he leaves the latter burning when he goes out for dinner, which suggests that he either has nerves of steel or just doesn't think about burning the whole place down.



We went out for a great Greek meal in the middle of nowhere, Sweden (!) and talked about all kinds of computerized creative stuff. Michael is the creative director of a funky persistent world called Spineworld. It's isometric, looking a little like Habbo Hotel, only way more weird. It's also very low-bandwidth.

On the way back from dinner I slipped on some black ice and banged the back of my head very hard on the pavement. We put ice on it right away, and although it developed a goodly bump, I don't think I suffered any permanent damage.

The next morning I was off to my next gig, a week teaching at the University of Skövde. Many thanks, Michael!

A quick trip to the University of Gotland

Visby, Sweden

Last summer I went to Visby to serve as a juror at the Gotland Game Awards, hosted by the University of Gotland. We've been talking about setting up a more permanent arrangement, in which I'll formally become part of the faculty. Because I was in Sweden anyway to visit another of my favorite universities, I flew out to Gotland for a couple of days. I gave the students my Fundamentals of Game Design workshop and another lecture, and had some meetings with folks to discuss plans for the future.

When there are too many teams in my workshop to do a detailed presentation, I have each team make a sales poster instead, and show it to the group along with a short pitch. Here one of the teams is working on a game about saving whales. The approach they took was to let the player be a mermaid -- more of a siren, really -- who lures the whaling ships to their doom. I had in mind something more like Greenpeace and their zodiacs, but you can never tell what novice game designers are going to do.

Back to the NHL (not the National Hockey League!) again.

Leeuwarden, Netherlands

I went back to the Noordelijke Hogeschool Leeuwarden for more meetings with the students there and to talk about how I can help the program. Along the way I learned something I didn't know about the Dutch trains. The one I was riding in split into two, and one half went to Leeuwarden, and the other half went to Groningen -- which isn't even in the same province. Guess which one I was in.

I guess I was getting a little cocky about my ability to get around in countries where I don't speak the language. The announcements on the train were in Dutch, of course, and when they said which part of the train goes where, I never noticed. Oh, well, I'm forewarned for next time. Fortunately there was one more train going from Groningen to Leeuwarden that night, and I managed to catch it.

In addition to the work at the NHL, I also got some time to visit with my old friend, colleague, and competitor Noah Falstein. Noah is one of the few other people in the game industry who does what I do, working as a freelance design consultant. He'll be doing some work for the NHL as well, on different projects from mine. We went to dinner with some of the NHL faculty and Noah's wife, who was along for the visit. After dinner we went to see the new offices of the guy who recruited us both for the NHL... in a jail! Tim Laning of Grendel Games was instrumental in bringing us to work for NHL, and his company has just moved its offices into a former jail in the middle of Leeuwarden. It's a big old Victorian monstrosity from the 1880s, complete with judas holes in the cell doors. The building is being converted into offices and shops, but it will still retain some of its prison character. At the moment the conversion is just starting, so it's still pretty grim inside.


Don't know why I look so pleased. Photo: Noah Falstein

Another workshop at FITA.

Angoulême, France

I went back again this year to the International Forum on Animation Technologies, which in French has the acronym FITA. It was their tenth year, so they were justifiably proud of all that they have accomplished. I don't have a single picture, unfortunately -- like last year, I only stayed one day, and spent almost all the time giving my own workshop on interactive storytelling.

Keynote at Swansea Animation Days... again.

Swansea, Wales

For the second time, I had the privilege of delivering the opening keynote at the Swansea ANimation Days festival -- at least, the Game Days part of it, which comes first. The last time I was there was in 2006, and the festival just seems to keep getting bigger and better. In addition there was dinner at the house of the Lord Mayor of Swansea, complete with the Lord Mayor himself, and his wife, in attendance, wearing their gold chains of office.

Gold chains of office are something we don't do much in the United States. Just as the Queen is a constitutional monarch, so the Lord Mayor is a constitutional mayor -- the job only lasts for a year and I think his duties are strictly ceremonial. Still, he gets to live in a pretty nice house with some amazing silver dishes. I didn't ask what he thought about having a bunch of animation geeks and game developers to dinner, but he seemed gracious about it.

The talk I gave was "A New Vision for Interactive Stories," my GDC lecture from 2006. There was a good crowd, despite my being first thing in the morning and a number of them rather sleepy. I was rather sleepy myself, if the truth were told. The next night there was another, less formal and more intimate dinner for the speakers. Unfortunately, I can't remember who all is who in this picture, except that the guy on the left is the wonderful Ed Hooks, who teaches acting to animators all over the world. Like me, he divides his time between consulting and doing workshops. The lady at the back next to me is Felicity Blastland, who organizes SAND every year and makes sure we all have a good time. We did!

Workshops at Dublin Institute of Technology

Dublin, Ireland

For the third year in a row I went to Dublin, twice, to give game design workshops at the Dublin Institute of Technology. They invite high school students in and give them a pitch about the benefits of studying game development at DIT, and then we design a bunch of crazy games. These are some of the biggest workshops I've ever done -- once there were a hundred participants -- and they always sell out.

Here's the poster:

A week teaching at Instituto Superior Técnico

Porto Salvo, Portugal

A couple of years back I met a cool professor named Katherine Isbister, who was studying social interfaces at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At some point, Katherine got a chance to go teach at in Portugal for a week at the prestigious Instituto Superior Técnico which is sort of the MIT of Portugal. When they were looking around for another guest lecturer, she kindly recommended me. After some discussions with Rui Prada, the guy in charge, we fixed a date and off I went. Rui works on human interactions with autonomous virtual characters -- definitely a useful research subject for video games.



I've only been to Portugal once before, when I went to Lisbon to teach for Universidade Lusófona. I had a good time and went to Lisbon castle, which is extremely cool, but I didn't get to move around much. This time I rented a car. The IST campus where I was teaching was in Porto Salvo, outside Lisbon, but I stayed in a seaside resort town called Estoril. As you can see, it's gorgeous:



I didn't do anything very touristy, just cruised around in the car, but I noticed how much the landscape reminds me of California -- warm, dry and rather dusty, but with the ocean nearby

I did a variety of events with the students, including giving them my character design workshop.




The faculty were all great and one evening I went and played a German board game about colonizing the West Indies with them. Interesting game -- there was very little element of chance, but enough different kinds of strategies that you couldn't easily predict what was going to happen. Unfortunately, I've forgotten its name.

The Solomon's Judgment machine.

Leeuwarden, Netherlands

Last May I went to the Exposure '08 event in Leeuwarden in the northern Netherlands, and then I went to GAmeland in September. Both were courtesy of the Northern College of Leeuwarden. Now I've started work for the NHL, as it's known, on a regular basis. For the next little while, I'll be consulting for the college and working with the students on quite a number of projects.

One of the projects I'll be involved with concerns an extraordinary machine built in the early 1900s. Beginning in the Renaissance, German clockmakers began creating wonderful mechanical devices that acted out stories from the Bible using puppets. In the early 1900s, a young Dutchman named Jan Elzinga decided to build one himself -- all by himself. And he did. It's called "Solomon's Judgment," and it tells the Biblical story, in mime, of how Solomon was required to decide which of two women was the true mother of a child. (You can find the story in 1 Kings 3:16-28, if you don't know it.)

Elzinga was a mechanical genius, but he was poor. He lived alone with his mother, had no job, and had to scrounge parts wherever he could find them -- mostly from the blacksmith's forge and the bicycle shop. He shut himself in his room, and for three years, he worked on his amazing invention. When it was done, it was one of the wonders of the Netherlands, and it was put on display all over the country. Originally it had to be cranked by hand, and it ran for 35 minutes continuously. To reset it, it has to be cranked backwards for 35 minutes!

Sometime in the 1930s, though, the machine was damaged in shipment, and was not repaired. Jan Elzinga died in 1947, and when he went, the secret of the machine went with him. He never made any plans -- they were all in his own head. Two mechanical engineers tried to restore the machine in the 1970s, mostly during their spare time. They made a lot of notes, but even they never fully understood it.

This is where I get involved. The Solomon's Judgment machine now sits, broken, in the Martena Museum in the the town of Franeker. The museum doesn't want to try to repair it, but they have some money to make a virtual 3D model of the machine, and a video game that incorporates the machine as one element. The game design students at NHL are designing the game, and the 3D students are doing the modeling. As you can see from the pictures, it's a huge task. The model will enable us to make an animation of the machine in operation -- the first time that anyone has seen it (or rather, its virtual equivalent) working in over 30 years. My job is to advise the students on the game. When we're done, it will run on a kiosk in the museum, and perhaps on the museum's web site also.

I find this incredibly exciting. I love old technology, especially mechanical things, and you don't often get a chance to work on something like this. Although it's thousands of years younger and its purpose is known, it sort of reminds me of the Antikythera Mechanism -- a mysterious machine whose workings are not well understood.

Workshops and Siege Engines in Norway!

Rena, Norway

Wow, did I have fun at Hedmark University College in Norway. I met the nice folks there when I went to the JoinGame conference a few months ago, and they seemed really interested in a visit. This week I got the opportunity. I flew to Oslo and then took the train to Rena.

The college has three campuses, and this one is in a small but very pretty town in eastern Norway. The province of Østerdalen is a mountainous area used by the military for special forces training -- lots of lakes and rivers. All the leaves were turning color and there was a decided chill in the air.

The college has an ordinary modern building, but I gave my workshops in a separate place -- a old wooden building made of logs that smelled wonderful. There was a church in the town built in the same style, but unfortunately I didn't get a chance to look inside.

The students all seemed to be very interested in the work and I think they enjoyed themselves. In addition to learning game programming they're also designing a board game, and the best one may be published. I'm always pleased when I find game design students working on a non-computerized game -- I think it's important for them to realize that games are games regardless of what medium they're in. Obviously the computer allows us to do things we can't do otherwise, but the heart of the experience is still the same: gameplay.

The night I arrived I had a surprisingly good Chinese meal (Rena has only 7000 people but two Chinese restaurants) with Sule Yildirim, the head of the computer science department there. On the second night, after the workshop, all the students and faculty headed out to an Italian place that served gyro (doner) kebab pizza, which was new to me.

One of the highlights of the visit for me was getting to see, and indeed release, a small home-made trebuchet. If you're not a fan of medieval siege engines this probably won't mean much to you, but in my experience a lot of computer people love them. This one was built in a single day by one of the faculty, Simon McCallum, a kiwi whom I met four years ago at the Fuse conference in Dunedin, New Zealand.

The Romans had a kind of catapult (known in the Middle Ages as a mangonel) that worked with a spring made of tightly twisted rope, but as Simon explained to me, they were dangerous. If something went wrong, all that pent-up energy had to go somewhere, and the thing could literally fly to pieces, killing the crew. I knew how mangonels worked, but it never occurred to me what would happen if the frame gave way.

The trebuchet is a later and safer invention. It's essentially a sling, extended by a long pole. You pull down on one end of the pole, and the other rises up and slings the projectile. The later and more famous version of the trebuchet used very heavy (many tons) weights to throw stones weighing hundreds of pounds. Simon's is an earlier design, the traction trebuchet. The crew simply pull down on ropes to sling the arm. The advantage of this approach is that all the energy is in the human beings -- the device is completely safe to its users provided that the sling is adjusted properly. For maximum distance, the projectile should leave the sling heading upwards at a 45 degree angle.

In the pictures you can see Simon showing off one of the stones it throws (it weighed about five pounds), then getting ready to put it in the sling, and finally, at the moment of release as everybody pulls down on the ropes. I got to sit where Simon did and throw a rock of my own.

Now consider this: This device took one day to build, cost almost nothing, and could throw a heavy stone well over a hundred yards. When you imagine a determined army armed with a dozen or so of these devices on a far larger scale, it's no wonder that castles had walls 12 feet thick. A steady rain of heavy rocks would unnerve anyone.

On the second day I gave a lecture about character design and a short workshop on serious games. That evening I had the pleasure of attending a concert of various Norwegian pop and folk songs put on by the townsfolk. One of the faculty, Tone Vold, was the stage manager and got me the ticket. Even though I didn't understand a word, it was a lot of fun. I had forgotten how enjoyable live performances are.

Unfortunately the computer science program at Hedmark is under threat -- the administration says there aren't enough students. It would be a shame to lose it... I'd really like to visit again some time.

Quick lecture at Futures 2008

London, UK

Back at Games:EDU this summer, I met Chris Linford, who's Head of Digital Media at the London College of Communication. (The LCC is part of the University of the Arts London.) He invited me to come along to a conference, and so I did. Futures 2008 is an event that the LCC puts on specifically for their own students. A lot of them have never been to a professional event before, and the LCC wants to give them a little experience with it before they dive headfirst into something gigantic like the Games Convention.

Anyway, I went up to London for the afternoon. They had a nice lunch at an Indian restaurant for us speakers, and then I addressed the students on the future of computer entertainment. Interesting crowd. A surprising number of them had foreign accents -- in fact, just about all the ones who asked questions -- so maybe the program is particularly attractive to visiting students. I didn't get to stay long, though, because I had to pack for a trip to Norway the next day.