The Late Dan Head

Dan Head

I only recently realized that I hadn't seen any posts from an old friend, Dan Head, in a while on Facebook, so I went to his profile to see what was up.  There I found out that he'd passed away on August 14th in Eugene, Oregon.

Here's a post I put on his page for any of his online friends to see...

Oh, I'm so sorry to hear of Dan's passing.  I only just saw this now, when I went to look at why I didn't recall seeing any of Dan's posts for a few months.

Dan and I were friends since elementary school in Waldport, when, though he was a year older than me, we played on the same little league baseball team.

In Junior High we had art class together.  One of those classes without the usual lectures and tests and school work, giving us students lots of time to visit and chit chat and goof off together. We were in the same in-class social group there.  The teacher usually let students pick music to play while the class worked and I remember Dan usually picked Ted Nugent's "Intensities in Ten Cities," though I wasn't into that sort of music yet.

I still remember a particular painting he did in class, three silver globes clustered together, floating over some kind of landscape.  

In high school we fell into the same social group again, a bunch of us hanging out every morning before class in either the counselor's office, with its round table and office-style swivel chairs, or if he had a meeting, in the home-ec room.  Talking about inane teenage stuff, but as a group of book loving teens, often working in a lot of puns and wordplay into our discussions.  For a couple of years we had a game where one person would pound the table and say a general subject and we'd spend all day trying to make our puns fit the subject (e.g. "birds" would be an emu-sing day...)

While most of our group likes fantasy, swords & sorcery books, Dan and I were the only ones who enjoyed John Norman's "Gor" series beyond the first book.  Both of us read all twenty plus books available then, and everyone else considered us a bit sick for that.

Being a year apart, we didn't have many classes together, just a few electives, but they were fun for socializing.  Classes like TV Production were like junior high art, not very structured and much of the work was done outside class hours, so in class every day was social hour to visit, discuss books, discuss music and all that...

We were both in the small school Games Club that met a couple of times a month to play war games, either in school or at our teacher's house to play games like Diplomacy, Russian Campaign, Squad Leader and so forth.  Lots of fun, lots of socializing.  Mostly it was the same group of us that met in the mornings, but with a few younger guys as well.

Some of our discussions, especially about a particular H.P. Lovecraft story we both liked have had life-long effects on me.  Talking to Dan back then, at 14 years old convinced me to basically reject religious belief altogether.  Though I'm not sure any of us actually knew much of atheism them, except as something portrayed as evil and communist, which we weren't.  But that's relieved quite a burden off me for decades.

I think the last time I can remember seeing Dan must've been around 1988, when a large group of our social circle were back in Waldport for holidays or summer or something, and we got together with a former teacher to play games.  We stayed up late into the night, playing a board game, chowing down Diane's Nacho Cheese tortilla chips, guzzling soda, talking, visiting and laughing.  

Life was already taking us all in different directions.  But it's a good memory.

Just for reference, here's the profile picture he set on Facebook at some point in the last couple of years...  It's not my photo, of course, so no credit to me.

Minute to Lose It

I've been seeing ads all over recently for a new New York Lottery game called Minute To Win It.  But I really don't like these ads...  They just seem so wrong...

First off...  It's just like the game show?  I looked up the game show, Minute To Win It, since I'd never heard of it (not a surprise as I don't have a TV).  A scratch-off lottery ticket doesn't sound even remotely like the game show.

"But a whole lot easier?"  Isn't that pretty much contradicting that it's "just like the the game show?"  If it's really a whole lot easier, it can't be a challenge like the game show...  Every card is predetermined to be a winner or a loser, with no skill involved what-so-ever, it's all plain luck...

"No Time Limit..." Hmmm...  That bugs me, too, for two reasons...  First of all the name says "minute" in it, and that it's just like the game show, in which contestants have a time limit of one minute.  Plus, the graphic by it shows what appears to be a countdown, sort of making it seem like there's a time limit, you have to what, scratch off the whole card in a minute?

The name having "Win It" makes it sound like it's already a winner...  Never mind the odds of actually winning, especially the $1 million they fuss over, is so low, it's more realistically like "A Minute to Lose 5 Bucks".  And raising hopes of winning up can't be good, considering the majority of people buying losing lottery tickets are the lower income people who can least afford it.  There's a reason it's jokingly called "a tax on people who can't do math."

Sports

While not much of a sports fan myself, having been away from the United States for an extended time, I've recently realized why the sports that most of the world love just aren't popular in America.

We Americans like our sports much faster paced than everyone else.

For instance, take the recent FIFA World Cup football (soccer to Americans...). Two hours for one, single goal? That's nuts. That's boring! And that's hardly unusual in terms of soccer games, which are usually relatively low scoring.

The nearest equivalent to soccer we have in the U.S. is ice hockey, with typically low scores and it probably ranks last in terms of popularity among professional sports. If it didn't have regular fights, it'd probably be less popular.

Compare soccer to basketballs, another near equivalent in terms of game play. Both have the ball in almost constant movement as the teams move it up and down the playing field to get it into a goal, with the game's duration based on a clock. In basketball they update the rules on a regular basis to make it more exciting for spectators, including a 24 second shot clock, requiring a team that gets possession of the ball to make a goal attempt within 24 seconds or risk losing the ball. And looking at the FIFA world cup again, with 31 goal attempts, in two hours? Yawn!

Baseball vs. cricket, again two sort of similar sports, with bats and balls and similar ideas in terms of offense and defense.

Cricket has two main variants, test matches and one day international matches. Test matches take several days, while one day ones take, well, one day... From my experience watching them, they're slow and dull.

With one day matches, first one side does all of its offensive play while the other does all its defensive play, then they swap, with each "innings" taking roughly 3 to 4 hours. So, even if one team is much worse than the other, it still takes almost the full day to see them lose, especially if they're second at bat, when they may use the whole set of overs to chase the better team. By the end of the game both teams are tired and not playing at their best, so we never see a more even match up between them.

Compared with baseball, in which each team alternates offensive and defensive play, swapping each time there's three outs. Most games take between two and three hours, only going longer if they're pretty evenly matched.

With baseball we get to see each team play both offense and defense when they're fresh at the beginning all the way till they're tired at the end, so it seems like a more even and fair match between them.

So, overall, it just seems that American sports are geared towards a faster pace and more exciting entertainment. But then, I guess we're more accustomed to instant gratification...

War Game Potential on Microsoft Surface

In a Skype based interview the other night, the interviewer wanted a quick idea of how I'd go about solving a problem so he asked me to begin designing a Monopoly game, asking what entities I'd make, what functions on some of them, etc.

For the Player object I said we'd need a rollDice() method.

But then I got to thinking about dice games. I've played a lot in the past and was a keen war gamer in high school, and the physical act of rolling the dice was definitely part of the fun. Even knowing that it won't really affect the randomness, there's still an aspect of blowing on the dice, talking to them, "oh yeah, c'mon 6, 6, c'mon!" and trying to throw them with a different wrist movement because you know you want a different result than the previous roll...

But with war games on computers, it's not as much fun to simply click a "roll" button on the screen. Even if the program makes a noise like dice banging together and shows the roll results like a pair of dice, it's just not the same.

So, then I realized, computerizing dice games would be great on Microsoft Surface. The game, board, pieces, etc. could be in the software, but with its cameras under the surface, you could do the physical rolling of the dice on top and it could determine what you rolled. This would work because nearly all six sided dice are standard with opposite paired faces:

1 : 6

2 : 5

3 : 4

That way, the cameras in Surface could read the the side that faces down and as long as you're not using weird, hand-made or nonstandard dice, it would know what came up on top.

As for the cardboard counters, sometimes they're fun to move, but not as much as hand rolling the dice, that's where the real action is. With Surface able to detect where you're pointing, having the counters computerized would still be fun because you'd still be able to use your finger to move them around between hexes. The computer, too, would be able to validate the moves and make sure you're not moving them too far or into the wrong hexes (my friends and I were friendly players and didn't cheat that way, but that isn't to say we never made honest mistakes).

Of course, a quick Google search turns up I'm not the first person who thought of it, either... Most of those hits are for Dungeons & Dragons games, but the same applies. And so this would work pretty well, too for things like my father's favorite game, backgammon and what-not.