We’re going to have an event this evening to which legislators are invited, and I’ll be showing Melting Point there. Should be interesting.

There was an in which I was featured:

But now he is working on a game called “Melting Point,” which has been built to educate both children and adults about the environmental factors of global warming by allowing them to experiment with various environmental, scientific and political factors in a simulation game. Quirk originally wanted to take Melting Point to consumers in the traditional gaming manner. But as the idea came closer to commercialization, he realized that he couldn’t follow the same blueprint.

“Originally I was going to sell to the mass market as a downloadable game that took two hours to play,” Quirk said. “But it’s too difficult as a small company with limited funding, so I have simplified it to a 5-minute Flash game.”

That short game will act as a marketing tool for a full-length game that Quirk hopes will be adopted by a partner and become server-based, where it can be sold to educational institutions or individuals.

For the OLPC Game Jam, we had a couple of articles. in Mass High Tech:

Local gaming professionals on tap to participate in the event include Kent Quirk, chief technical officer of Waltham-based[sic] CogniToy LLC.

“Let’s put some powerful tools into the hands of the kids, and let them take their learning further,” said Quirk, who is volunteering his time for the event.

A nice article by Hiawatha Bray, the Boston Globe’s technology writer:

This weekend, about 17 game developers will try to do just that during a “game jam” at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham. They aim to crank out seven or eight titles in three days, according to Kent Quirk, chief technology officer of Cognitoy LLC, a game development company in Acton.

“Games can’t teach everything,” said Quirk, who will participate in the jam, “but they can make some kinds of learning a whole lot more palatable.”

And finally, The Needham Channel did a news report, so I finally got to see what I look like on TV. Can’t say I’m too impressed, especially with the still shots in the teaser, but I wasn’t terrible.

Good news

• First time we’ve ever had multiple generations playing games at the same time
• Most game machines are connected
• With game design you can seamlessly connect to activism — civil disobedience, Meetup
• Democratization of the tools
• “Double bottom line companies” — financial and social return

Bad news:

• Entertaining games are still very very very hard to make
• Activism is very very very hard
• Games for change are very^6 hard.

If you think you’re gonna repurpose your content it’s not gonna work.

You have to play games, understand the genres! (He’s talking to the academics / activists)

Once you know what you want to do, you can enormously reduce your risk if you work with actual developers. Software can get away from you — find people who know how to build it.

If you do all that, you can change the world…and you will.

I was up until far too late putting some additional polish on Melting Point. Today is the first time anyone outside of Friends and Family has seen it.

It’s looking pretty good — a couple of people who saw it casually commented that it looks great. I just wish it was closer to being truly finished. We’ve only had it with anything resembling gameplay since last week, and I haven’t had any time all weekend to work on it (more on that later). I had been having trouble with game balance and finally, last night on the way down on the train, I found a massive bug in the scoring totals that was screwing everything up. Fixed that and things look a lot better — but now I have to go back and rebalance things. I think I’m closer now — at least it appears to work reasonably close to “right” for some common cases.

I’ll probably blog the talks I find inspiring…but I also still have some work to do before the Expo starts this afternoon!

I don’t think I’ve even blogged about it…but I rebooted the project a few months back. The game as planned was going to be a downloaded game that players would buy, install and play. The game would take 1-2 hours to play.

As the game market and the political market have been changing, I’ve realized that an approach like that (direct sales to consumers of an installable game) was probably doomed to fail.

Consequently, I changed course. The new version of the game is played in a browser, for free (at least free to the player) and takes 5 minutes to play 50 years of the climate. It feels fast…and it is. But I hope that people will remember that feeling as one of the takeaways.

The game will be shown publicly for the first time next week at the Games For Change festival in NYC! I’m excited and nervous. And I have a lot of work still to do (with help from others who are also working on it).

I also had a great conversation with someone from environmental defense, which seems to be a combination of think tank and political organization. I really liked this post on their blog. I hope we can find ways to work together

Finally, Kim and I had a delightful conversation with Sophie Metge and her husband Nicolas. She writes a mostly-French-language blog on how Americans are dealing with global warming. She was kind enough to blog it in English.

With just one-sixth of the US money targeted for the Iraq war, you could convert all cars in America to run on ethanol.

TheBudgetGraph.com estimates that converting the 136,568,083 registered cars in the United States to ethanol (conversion kits at $500) would cost $68.2 billion.

[source]

Let’s not quibble about whether we’d be able to generate that much ethanol — that’s not really the point. The next time someone tells you that mitigating the impact of global warming will be “too expensive”, ask if the war in Iraq is “too expensive”.

…for me to say that the defense capabilities of the United States are such that they could inflict terrible losses upon an aggressor, for me to say that the retaliation capabilities of the United States are so great that such an aggressor’s land would be laid waste, all this, while fact, is not the true expression of the purpose and the hope of the United States.

To pause there would be to confirm the hopeless finality of a belief that two atomic colossi are doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world. To stop there would be to accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed, the annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind handed down to use generation from generation, and the condemnation of mankind to begin all over again the age-old struggle upward from savagery toward decency, and right, and justice. Surely no sane member of the human race could discover victory in such desolation.

Could anyone wish his name to be coupled by history with such human degradation and destruction? Occasional pages of history do record the faces of the “great destroyers,” but the whole book of history reveals mankind’s never-ending quest for peace and mankind’s God-given capacity to build.

It is with the book of history, and not with isolated pages, that the United States will ever wish to be identified. My country wants to be constructive, not destructive. It wants agreements, not wars, among nations. It wants itself to live in freedom and in the confidence that the people of every other nation enjoy equally the right of choosing their own way of life.

So my country’s purpose is to help us move out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light, to find a way by which the minds of men, the hopes of men, the souls of men everywhere, can move forward toward peace and happiness and well-being.

In this quest, I know that we must not lack patience. I know that in a world divided, such as ours today, salvation cannot be attained by one dramatic act. I know that many steps will have to be taken over many months before the world can look at itself one day and truly realize that a new climate of mutually peaceful confidence is abroad in the world. But I know, above all else, that we must start to take these steps now.

Schnayerson lets Ebell and a whole variety of scientists debate through his article, and the more you read, the more he sounds like a liar. It’s good stuff like this:

In 50 years, Ebell says, if global warming has really become the problem alarmists say it will be, the technology to deal with it then will be 50 years better than it is now. So let’s wait until then, and tackle it more intelligently, more efficiently—more cheaply—than we can today.

To Harvard’s Paul Epstein, that’s the skeptics’ most reprehensible claim. “Not only have the skeptics and the administration been misleading us about the science but about the economic consequences of trying to deal with this problem,” he says. “They’ve maintained this big lie that we’re going to lose if we deal with this now. In truth, Detroit is losing heavily because we’re not dealing with this now. We’re losing by not moving toward green buildings and hybrid cars and co-generation. Companies that are doing this are saving money.”

Worth the read.

As he points out, when Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed on The Daily Show, he said that “our planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of us and should.”

I’m not there yet. While there’s plenty of evidence that we’re working pretty damn hard to destroy the planet, I’m also a great believer in the fundamental goodness of mankind and in our power to effect positive change when we’re properly motivated. I hope we have the collective foresight to take action in time, rather than waiting so long that our children end up vastly poorer.

The latest IPCC report is out, and it ain’t pretty.

Global warming is already affecting a lot of things. We’re already too late to prevent some of the changes. We can ameliorate the problem with action on the generation side, but we’re also going to have to adapt.

From an LA Times article:

“Don’t be poor in a hot country, don’t live in hurricane alley, watch out about being on the coasts or in the Arctic, and it’s a bad idea to be on a high mountain,” said Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, one of the scientists who contributed to the report.

Kinda kills those vacation home plans, dunnit?