I <3 the Internet

Warning stream of consciousness ahead!

Well I guess it all really started from a magazine. Today at work we recieved our regular subscription to Museums magazine. It sounds really exciting, I know but in it was an article by an interesting woman who I sheepishly admit I thought was a man because it was about gaming. She wants to use gaming in all sorts of great ways, including saving the world and having a game designer win a Nobel Prize. In the article she talked about happiness and how video games are really great at producing happiness based on some basic principles happiness researchers (yup they exist) have found. This all connected to museums because she thought museums should be at the forefront of creating happiness and that they could use the principles of gaming to do so.

Sooooo I've been thinking lately about my degree topic (educational technology) and how the part I'm really interested in is individualized instruction. I really think that's where technology has a chance to shine instead of just being annoying and hard to work/incorporate into the classroom.

When I first heard about gaming and ed-tech I thought, 'eh'. I've seen Scott play and play and play and didn't really want to have much more involvement than that. But when my professor described the way games can become really great individualized instructors my interest was piqued.

Anyway, back to Jane McGonigal, who happens to be the lady I was talking about earlier. She's awesome. I found her blog and she has some great stuff there and great ideas in general. I am always a fan of the "make the world a better place" ideas. But doing that while having fun is even better. She talks about how people spend 20 hours a week on World of Warcraft and compares that to the amount of time it's taken to build Wikipedia to it's current state. Basically WOW players could have make Wikipedia in a few months. She also links to this site where you play a game of exchanging and building on ideas the Signtific Lab. Their name bugs me because I always want to pronounce the G. So that was interesting, so is her Top Secret Dance Off. You can browse her blog for yourself to find all these crazy things.

I don't know if this gets anyone else excited, but I can't wait for the future and to meet people like her and to create games to educate people well and change the world and GRRRR just DO something with my life.

p.s. I was going to make a super secret dance and post it, but I made the super secret dance video and decided that it should remain secret.

A bit of science geekery

So, I was hanging around in the lab today and realized something that shook my understanding of the video game universe. Like many of you, I played Duck Hunt on the Nintendo during my childhood. I'd use the zapper to shoot each duck, thinking that somehow the TV was registering my shots. But think about this for a moment. There is no way in hell that the TV could figure this stuff out. So how was this gun working anyway?

Fortunately this sort of question is exactly what the internet was designed for, and I quickly found an answer. It seems that the gun doesn't shoot the ducks on the TV, rather it detects an instantaneous change in the display when you pull the trigger, and registers this change based on an electrical pulse from a photodiode located inside the barrel. The change in the screen occurs much faster than you can see which answers the obvious question of why you never saw it. Think of all the subliminal messaging fun!

Basically, after pulling the trigger the entire screen goes black and on one frame after another, each duck is represented by a white square. The game is able to tell which duck you hit by which white screen was onscreen when the photodiode activates.

What I want to know now is, if I were to point the gun at a bright light, would I automatically get a duck everytime?