Script for Eli Dupree's Lasercake talk, April 29 2013

I titled this talk, "What is Lasercake", but I'm going to start out with a harder question: What is a game? Suppose you're looking at Wikipedia, and you use your mouse and keyboard to *navigate* in order to reach an article with the information you want, that's your *goal* - hardly anybody thinks of that as a game. But now, let's say that instead of a mouse cursor, there's a little icon of a plumber, (is it a game yet?) and you use the arrow keys to move the plumber around (is it a game yet?), and instead of reading encyclopedia articles you are dodging evil mushrooms (is it a game yet?), and instead of looking for information you're looking for a page where there is an icon of a princess - *then*, everyone agrees that it is a game. But when did it become a game? Both activities have objectives and challenges, and both of them can be fun. But in one of them, a designer intentionally created the obstacles solely to make the player have fun - while on Wikipedia they were just trying to deliver information in the most efficient way. It's not all about fun, though - in a game that tells a story, you can act out a really sad scene, and that's intended to convey an emotion different than fun - and it's not all about challenges and objectives - there are some games that are just an activity, like playing catch, and some that have no clear end goal, like tag. So the definition I'll use is, "A game is an interactive system that where the ways you interact with the system were intentionally designed to have a purpose unto themselves." It's pretty broad, but it'll do.

So, how many of you have played with LEGO bricks? Now, are LEGO bricks a game? By my definition, they are: with LEGOs, you have fun and learn the *process* of building with them. By comparison, the process of reading the Wikipedia article is only to convey the denotative meaning of the sentences on it. You can have fun and learn from reading them the sentences, but that's more like the delivery of a product than like an interactive process.

So here's my game, Lasercake. I envision it being like LEGO bricks - I'll get back to that comparison in a moment. What you're looking at is a view from the point of view of a "robot" - you're playing the role of the robot, and you can move around and build things. This is just a prototype of the game - there'll be a lot more stuff to play with as I develop it more this summer, not to mention that it will look more like the actual Earth, instead of this blocky grey ground and black sky. [invite people to come up and play it]

Everyone has some tricky practical dilemmas in their life - for example, a lot of people ask "Do I go for the healthy diet or the cheap diet?". But the reason we have to ask that question at all is because of our utter failure as a society to provide all people with food that is both healthy and affordable. I believe that the question "Should I do my homework or should I play games?" is the exact same thing, and the future of education will BE games. Think about how we teach science - science is cool, but the way we teach science is profoundly uncool. Telling someone that they need to memorize facts in order to write them down again on a test and get a numerical grade is extremely uncool! There's been some good research on the effects of external judgments like that - children are naturally curious about how the world works, but when you give them external rewards, it actually causes a long-term decrease in their intrinsic motivation. There's an old joke [tell it] and that is essentially what most schools are doing! It's terrible! But now, imagine that children could learn all of the science on their own time by playing around with it at their own initiative. Of course, it would be irresponsible to give them all science labs and let them blow themselves up, so I want to give them something even better - a virtual science lab where you can build entire industrial projects, and if you blow them up by accident then only virtual people get hurt by it.

Now, the power of games is already being used - it's just that this power is being used for evil. In 2001, the US Army released the game America's Army, and it quickly became one of its most effective recruiting tools. It was praised for depicting combat realistically, but it's deceptively realistic, because in real life it's not a good idea to go around shooting people in foreign countries. Now, don't get me wrong - there's a lot of people who think that violent video games in general are ruining our country, and that's not true - children have played violent games throughout history, just in different forms - but when you have enough credibility to pretend that something is actually realistic, THEN it can be dangerous. You can't always influence people's conscious beliefs, but you can sure influence their assumptions and their ways of thinking. For example, most people don't really think about all of the environmental damage done by mining. And all of our games that depict mining - I've played a lot of games where you dig in the ground to find gems and stuff - ALL of them depict it as a basically clean process where you just drill the rock into nonexistence in front of you - and so people can just keep assuming that real-life mining is kind of like that. Lasercake doesn't do that - in Lasercake, when you dig in the ground, you have to take the rubble and dump it somewhere - you can see that now - and as I develop the game further, the rubble will also pollute the surrounding land, it'll kill the plants that are living there, and the soil will be more prone to erosion - all those environmental consequences that you don't see playing traditional games. And when a game DOES depict those things, it can be really powerful. I remember one day in middle school where I was talking to someone who played Civilization 2 - that's a computer game where you build cities all over the Earth, and you build armies and try to capture other people's cities. And in that game, if you build too much stuff, you cause pollution, and if you don't clean up the pollution, then you get global warming, and you end up with most of the world's vegetation dying - you actually see most of the landmass turn to desert. And the person I was talking to said that when he saw that in the game, he was just overwhelmed with the fear that we were going to see that happen in real life. Of course, fear isn't the most productive emotion, but I can work with that. When you see something with your own senses, that came out of something you built yourself - that has a lot of impact, and you remember it.

So, with Lasercake, we're trying to make a game where the things you remember are actually *correct*.

So we're using a lot of real-life science. When you build and move things, that's going to take energy that's measured in the same units we use in real life, and we're actually going to have conservation of energy. You'll have solar panels, wind turbines, and stuff - and they're going to produce the same amount of energy they would in real life. Quick, which takes more energy - pumping a bathtubfull of water up three stories, or leaving a 60-watt light bulb on for 20 minutes? You probably have no idea - I'd have no idea either if I didn't do the math when I was writing the script for this. Even if you study it in the kind of class where you get numerical grades, you still won't get an intuitive sense of the relative magnitude of those things. You have to actually work with it. Games are great for practicing resource management, because they give you virtual resources, and if you mess it up, it only hurts you in the game. But we have a lot of games where you manage money to buy weapons, and not a lot of games where you manage the resources that human life is relying on. Of course, there's SimCity, a game where you take on the role of a city manager, choose tax rates, and spend money on city infrastructure - and that game has actually been used to help train people for city-management roles in real life, although it's obviously not a complete training all by itself. And it still uses money - I think we're better off not thinking of everything in terms of money, because money makes it easy to ignore if something you're buying was built in a way that's extremely wasteful and destructive. In Lasercake, you'll actually be seeing the sources of all the resources you're using.

So that's THE MISSION. Now I'm going to move on to the part of my talk where I tell you about the process for actually doing this. It all started about two years ago - I was playing a game called Dwarf Fortress, where you play as a colony of dwarves who build things, and the game has flowing water in it that you can pump to different places and use to power water wheels. But if you pour out a lot of water, the game gets very slow. There are other games with flowing water that are very fast, but the water is limited or unrealistic. So I decided to try to make a water flow simulation that was both fast and at least somewhat realistic - but I didn't succeed at that. Until winter of last year, when my sibling and I worked on the problem together for more than a week, and came up with something that actually worked pretty well. And then we said "Well we have a cool water simulation - now let's build and entire game with robots!" And thus Lasercake was born. And then pretty soon we realized that it would work to bring in the educational mission. It was a bit more complicated than that, but I don't have a lot of time.

My sibling and I work together closely on almost every part of the project - the programming parts, the mission, the philosophy - though there are some bits that belong to one of us more than to the other. We both believe in the Free Software philosophy - that's free as in freedom, not price; we think that when a person has a piece of software, they have the right to see how it works, the right to share it, and the right to modify it and share their changes if they have the relevant skills. With most commercial software, you only buy a black-box version of the program, where it does its job but you can't look inside to see how it works or change it; to do that, you need the program's source code. We use the website "GitHub" to make all our source code publicly available as we develop it. With Free software, programmers can look at each other's work and collaborate, and there's a very large, robust Free Software community that our project fits into. Once the Lasercake project is more public, it's very likely that people from the community will volunteer to help improve it. We like volunteers - if any of you want to contribute to the project, there's a lot of different skills that we can use, like art, sustainable design, computer programming, geology, physics, sound design, gender studies, and many other things besides, so feel free to talk to me afterwards if you like the project and want to help out.

So, what goes into designing a game? A lot of it is arcane computer stuff that I'm saving for later. But it's not just about creating the literal program - it's also about figuring out how people will interact with it. For instance, these bits of rubble - that's the orange stuff - can be moved around by clicking on them. If you click on them in the right way, they get pushed away from you. But a lot of people who play the game assume they can click and drag - pick up the rubble and move it somewhere else and put it down. That doesn't work, and so they fail to move it where they want it. Who wants to tell me whose fault that is? It's all my fault! I'm the one who designed an system that doesn't work how people expect it to work. Of course, this is just a prototype, and that was the simplest way to move rubble I could think of - my real plan is to use exactly the "click and drag" system that seems natural to people. As a game designer, I'm putting a lot of work into a product that lots of people are going to use, and so I bear the whole responsibility for communicating as clearly as possible. And that means a lot of back-and-forth with people who play the game. I need to learn exactly how people perceive it so that I can have the best control over those perceptions. That goes especially for people who don't play many computer games, and for children - Lasercake is fairly complicated, and I want to make it as accessible to the widest audience possible, not just people who already know a lot of games.

When you play the game, you'll start out walking around digging up things like you see here - but as you start doing more and more stuff, you'll want to build more robots to do the tasks for you. [mention the autorobots iff it's convenient] So you'll have to have a way to tell them what to do - and for that, you'll write "robot plans". For example, one plan could be "Walk forward ten meters, then build a solar panel, then walk forward another ten meters, then build another solar panel, and so on"; you'll write that plan, then assign it to a robot, and then that robot will build a lot of solar panels while you go and work on something else. And eventually you'll want to automate it more, and you'll write more complicated plans - and the beauty of it is that these plans are actually simple computer programs within the program! Computers are very important in today's society, so computer programming knowledge is extremely valuable - but a lot of people are too intimidated to learn it, and for good reason, because programming tools are mostly designed by people who already know a lot about programming and don't think very much about education. And there's a huge gender issue there too - female people have an extra burden, because even the most hippie-ish Free Software groups still have a lot of casual sexism in them. But by rolling it into the robot plans, we can introduce people to programming in a way that's not intimidating - we call them "plans" rather than "programs" for exactly that reason. It's also a situation that can appeal to intrinsic motivations, since the plans will be immediately available to save their time and effort and make their robots do cool things. That's in contrast to a programming class, where you have to decide to take it - that's a big decision for someone who doesn't know what it will involve - and even then, it takes a while before you can do anything with much practical usefulness. But within the world of Lasercake, the basics will be useful immediately. And we're doing our best to make Lasercake, like LEGOs, transcend the boundaries of gender. Well, LEGOs in their heyday, anyway. Recently, the LEGO Group has produced a bunch of terrible gender-stereotyped sets. But I'll complain about that more some other time.

And that's Lasercake! I hope that it will help teach people things and move forward our understanding of education and sustainability. And I guess it would also be pretty nice if that knowledge can save the entire human race from rushing cheerfully into their own destruction.

Thank you everyone! I'll take questions now if you have them, and at 12:40 I'll give a talk about the technical aspects of the game, for any of you who are computer programmers and want to know more about the back end.