|||113314764476467822|||For those keeping track...Anyway, here's another excerpt from my partially unfinished novel:
Likewise, the controversy over which early computer game was first continues to rage. It may have been Dr. Edward Grunfungle's Jupiter Lander game written in 1962, which was a simulation of a spacecraft landing on Jupiter.
It wasn't played in real-time: the player (called a computer operator on perpetual coffee break, back in those days) would read the current staus of the ship on the line printer. Information such as fuel remaining, current velocity and distance from the planet were relayed. The player would then go to the punch card machine (similar in appearance and function to a manual typewriter) and punch a card with the amount of thrust they wanted to apply next turn.
The player would then head down 4 flights of stairs, card in hand, go through two security gates, wait in line with numerous scientists and accountants to have their card read by the card reader. They would then return upstairs and await their next turn when the printer updated the ship's status. This took between 30 minutes and several hours depending on the current work load of the mainframe computer.
Unfortunately each game turn only represented one second of game time, and considering you started your descent several thousand miles away from the planet, a game could easily take months to play. Even worse, you couldn't actually win the game, because as Dr. Grunfungle knew, you can't actually land on Jupiter as it's a gas giant with no known solid core. No matter how you played, your ship would eventually become crushed by the massive atmospheric pressure.
Nevertheless, this game spread around from research centre to research centre, and had many fans and perhaps even addicts. Someone did figure out that the only workable strategy was to apply maximum thrust right from the beginning and eventually you would entirely escape the planet's gravity, extending the life of the virtual astronaut nicely, but doing little for his quality of life.
|||113261954467491535|||Not Partially Unfinished
After pushing his design as far as he could go, he grew discouraged because he could think of very few useful messages he could convey with the limited technology. “IT THE HI-H LIFE” was the best he had come up with in his imaginary advertising campaign for a new high-rise office building when his mother, bringing his newly washed laundry to his room, asked Sokall if he was playing Hangman. She suggested he tried “G” next, and left her bachelor son to his games.
Sokall seized this misguided but nevertheless brilliant idea, and went to work creating the extra circuitry to allow the player to interactively solve the hangman puzzle. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the technology he had to work with, each hangman puzzle had to be hard-wired. Eventually he got it down to taking only a few hours to reconfigure the game, but even this proved to be beyond the patience of the most enthusiastic of the pioneering play-testers that he could find.
This led Sokall to then become the inventor of the plug-in game cartridge which would be so influential as the home video game market matured. But at this time, the cartridges measured approximately 10 inches by 14 inches, weighed over thirty-five pounds each, were potentially explosive if dropped, and still had the distinct disadvantage of only containing one single 16 character puzzle per cartridge.
Sokall, like Lebandoski, tried to find a manufacturer for his TV Hangman Game, but was also unable. In addition to all the reasons already cited above, the potential manufacturers got hung-up on the idea of how to label and market the cartridges. The initial straight-forward approach of naming the puzzle, such as “HIT THE TEE” or “LET THE FIE TOOT” was found to ruin the fun and surprise of solving the puzzle. Just simply numbering the puzzles wouldn’t work for long, since people would quickly learn that puzzle #13 was “IT TO LOO TOO” and so forth. Random assortments of unlabelled cartridges might have worked, but then there was the too certain chance of duplicates angering repeat customers. In the end, Sokall ended up giving up on trying to sell his Hangman system, and just continued to make puzzles to stump his mother, for his own personal enjoyment.
Years later, Frederick Sokall and Doug Lebandoski would meet and team up in a way that had a large impact on the video game industry, but for the time being, both remained unaware of one another’s nearly simultaneous discoveries, and the general public was likewise unaware of these two pioneering fathers, apart from the Heidenschieferfleebens and many other happy repaired television watchers.|||113167547926108042|||Excerpt Three
The programmer of yWriter, Simon Haynes, is also a published novelist. His Hal Spacejock series appears to be doing well, at least within the genre. With a name like Simon Haynes you'd expect him to be Australian, and you'd be right. I lived two years of my life in .au so that always earns bonus coolness points from me.
I really enjoyed browsing his website, and any fellow NaNoWriMo would probably be very interested in his series of articles about writing and the business surrounding it - check it out here.
And just because Tim cares, here's another excerpt from "The Entirely True Alt-History of Video Games". Watch out for the extreme run-on-sentence.
According to customers Mr. and Mrs. Jack Heidenschieferfleeben, Lebandoski was working on repairing their 1949 model television set. Jack Junior was viewing the repair man's progress anxiously. Lebandoski had unknowingly incorrectly wired some of his diagnostic equipment into the back of the television, and when he turned the set back on to run some tests, Jack Junior exclaimed "One Wall Paddleball!"
Everyone gathered around the set to see what the commotion was about, and after liberally applying some five-year old imagination to what they saw on the TV screen, they had to agree that yes indeed, it did look like a bit of a game of One Wall Paddleball was going on, despite being a bit blockier than normal.
After fixing the Heidenschieferfleeben's set, much to Junior's delight, Lebandoski went back to his shop and spent much of the next month replicating and improving upon that initial freak accident. He then had a working prototype which he had dubbed "Television One Wall Paddleball".
He tried shopping it around to various manufacturers who rejected it on various grounds. The most significant strike against it was the lack of widespread appeal of One Wall Paddleball, which was limited to a few regions around the United States of America. Even then, the potential manufacturers reasoned, who would want to sit inside their house playing Paddleball on their television set when they could be outside, playing the real thing?
Lebandoski's insistence that playing simulated sport on his machine was actually more healthy, since you were far less prone to injury sitting in your livingroom on the sofa fell on deaf ears, and eventually he gave up on his entrepreneurial venture, and went back to television repair.|||113133407742697565|||More NaNoWriMo
I started a second novel, and I'm up to almost 6000 words on it now, and I'm finding it far easier to write this post-apocalyptic novel than the previous idea, "The Entirely True Alt-History of Video Games". The new novel is still somewhat video game related - it's potentially the story for a game I'd like to make.
Anyway, I figure I'll post excerpts from my quickly-abandoned novel here over the next while, so here's part one (critical comments welcome):
Chapter One: Ancient History
People have pretty much always found time to play. Right after all the more primal needs are met, what’s a caveman to do for entertainment but hit his neighbour with a stick? Surely after a while that grew tiresome, so the caveman and his neighbour would each take a stick, and hit each other with them. And then they would hit each other less often, and instead take to hitting stones, or maybe a wound up ball of sinew or something, and then group themselves in groups (okay, that’s silly, let’s call them teams) with three forwards, two defensemen and a goalie on each side, on ice when the water hole froze over out in the savannah every so often.
That’s not necessarily the way it really happened, but surely it’s possible. Anyway, the point we’re trying to make is that people have always been trying to find new ways to entertain themselves, and it only makes sense that humanity would be using the most sophisticated technology we’ve come up with so far to play games. And look at pictures of nude people, but that’s not what this story is about.
This story is about the history of computer and video games, and every part of it is true if you choose to believe it. If you’re not convinced, you could pretend it’s just a speculative fiction story about an alternate earth in an alternative universe that is completely like the earth that you know so much about, except the parts that are different. That way you can go on believing whatever you want about the so-called real earth that you’re so knowledgeable about.
There is plenty of debate over who invented the first video game. Doug Lebandoski and Frederick Sokall are the two names most frequently cited. Both were TV repairmen and electronics hobbyists, and both made their discoveries largely by accident in 1951.|||113123126427759553|||NaNoWriMo So Far
I just received my copy of Chris Baty's "No Plot, No Problem", which is the semi-official help guide to the NaNoWriMo contest, written by the founder himself. I've been looking through it, and have some helpful hints to share with you guys, if you wish:
Sign up for an account at NaNoWriMo. This makes you an official participant, allows you to send in your manuscript to keep your word tally updated (remember, this is a "race" to 50,000 words in a month), and gives you access to the forums which seem overwhelming busy, but could be very useful if you're looking for some help/suggestions. I'd also like to start a mail list or something between the participants that I know personally, for encouragement/bragging. It seems that if you sign in, then click on Local Events->Writing Buddies, you can add users. Try adding me, MacbthPSW, and we'll see if that fits the bill.
BTW, think about donating to NaNoWriMo, to help cover their organizational costs.
Next, make two lists which will guide your writing: a list of all the things you think make a good novel (e.g. first person perspective, quirky characters, music, feisty old people) and another list of things you dislike in novels (irredeemably malicious main characters, books set on farms, books set in the nineteenth century). I stole those examples from Chris Baty.
If you're thinking about characters, ask yourself these sorts of questions about them: Age? Gender? Employment? Friends, family, love interests? What's their home like? Hobbies? What were they doing one year ago? Five years ago? Values and politics? It's suggested that if you know these things, the characters can largely write themselves.
Finally, realize that this dash to 50,000 words is just a first draft, and that pretty much nobody writes a great first draft. The novel will be crappy, but at least you've done it, and there will undoubtedly be good stuff in there. The point in emphasizing quantity over quality is to get over the inner critic that stops you from writing altogether. I figure even if you agonize over every sentence in your novel (and probably give up, or at least take years to write it) is it really going to be that much better than just flying through? It's going to be a first draft, no matter what.
I'm really looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with! And please, share your tips on what works (and dispute the ones above, if you have reason to).
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