From daydreaming to Avatar

I just read an article in Wired called Second Coming, which tells the story of how James Cameron's new movie Avatar came to be. It covers daydreaming about it in 1977 all the way to today (the movie comes out next Friday 18th). The article explains why Cameron seemed to disappear completely after Titanic came out (we haven't seen anything from him in 12 years): he wanted the alien world and its characters to be so realistic that he actually waited for technology to catch up with his visions. Hardware was also behind – a camera that excelled in shooting in both 2D and 3D filming didn't exist yet. He flew all the way to Tokyo with a partner to pitch a new camera technology of this caliber to Sony, and they agreed to produce it. Then he had to convince the movie theatre industry to upgrade theatres all over the country to support screening this new filming technology. It goes on and on, and ends with Fox giving Cameron $250 million for the project. My favorite parts were on the last page, and talked about the excruciating detail that went into dreaming up this fantasy planet called Pandora:

He started by hiring USC linguistic expert Paul Frommer to invent an entirely new language for the Na’vi, the blue-skinned natives of Pandora. Frommer came on board in August 2005 and began by asking Cameron what he wanted the language to sound like? Did he want clicks and guttural sounds or something involving varying tones? To narrow the options, Frommer turned on a microphone and recorded a handful of samples for Cameron.

The director liked ejective consonants, a popping utterance that vaguely resembles choking. Frommer locked down a “sound palette” and started developing the language’s basic grammatical structure. Cameron had opinions on whether the modifier in a compound word should come first or last (first) and helped establish a rule regarding the nature of nouns. It took months to create the grammar alone. “He’s a very intense guy,” Frommer says. “He didn’t just tell me to build a language from scratch. He actually wanted to discuss points of grammar.”

Amazing. Check out this mini "making-of" clip:



Here's some stuff about the planet's plant ecosystem:

[...] Cameron hired Jodie Holt, chair of UC Riverside’s botany and plant sciences department, to write detailed scientific descriptions of dozens of plants he had created. She spent five weeks explaining how the flora of Pandora could glow with bioluminescence and have magnetic properties. When she was done, Cameron helped arrange the entries into a formal taxonomy.

WOW. I would love to hang out with someone with such an insane imagination and tenacious attention to detail. This is just the tip of the iceberg, too – Cameron even had Pandora's atmospheric density calculated. Are you going to see this movie? I'm not that big on this type of science fiction, but I might have to be now.

Memory and cognitive easter eggs

Last week, my friend Laura and I were talking about riding a bike. Mostly, the type of balance that it requires, and what our neighborhoods were like, growing-up (conducive to bike riding, too dangerous, close to school, etc.). All of a sudden, I remembered learning how to ride a bike.


I don't remember how old I was, but it was in Germany. I was visiting my grandparents for a couple of weeks, and someone lent me a kid's bike. The street that my Oma and Opa's house was on sloped upward, and ended at a little market. My father would walk to the end of the street with me, and I would glide down, all the way to the house. I did this dozens of times, slowly inching the training wheels up little by little. Eventually, I pedaled all the way down. I had a huge grin on my face, and I think my dad was laughing (which he does when he's really excited about something). It was a beautiful day, the sun reflected off of the green and yellow fence, there were bees on the cherries that had fallen from the trees. It's such a vivid memory, and I hadn't thought about it... probably since it happened.

It reminded me of something I read in WIRED a month or two ago. There is this article about a woman with a seemingly photographic memory that explains how our brains store memories vs. computers. The short of it: computers have a very organized way of storing information, and it's instantly accessible at all times. It looks something like this:


And the brain is really messy about this whole process, which resembles something like this:


Here is the article text:

On a computer, every single bit of information is stored at a specific location, from which it can always be retrieved. Human recall is hit or miss. Neuroscientific research tells us that our brains don't use a fixed-address system, and memories tend to overlap, combine, and disappear for reasons no one yet understands.

The one thing we do know is rather vague: Memories live in the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. After that, the entire question of how memory works is up for grabs. For example, where precisely in the hippocampus (or prefrontal cortex) is my memory of reading Kurt Vonnegut for the first time? If I try to summon that experience, I am likely to wind up with a blur—a half dozen indistinct recollections. And no brain-scan technology will help me bring it into better focus.

This makes human memory sound potentially a pain in the neck, but it's really kind of awesome. Yeah, I wish there were a way to bring up perfect memories that I haven't thought about in a while. But with this "imperfect" way of storing, the brain actually becomes an enabler of cognitive easter eggs. Throughout life, there are little land mines that will trigger pleasant memories without warning that for years had been tucked away somewhere unreachable. Can't wait for my next one.


What are some of your recently triggered memories that you had forgotten about for a long time? What triggered them?

There's a lot more to board games than I thought.

Tonight I read an article called Monopoly Killer in Wired. It is one of the most interesting things I have read in recent memory, and my brain felt like a pinball the entire time. It's about a game called The Settlers of Catan, designed by a German man named Klaus Teuber. Over the past 14 years, it has become one of the biggest smash hits to ever happen to board games, translated into 30 languages and selling 15 million copies globally (FIFTEEN MILLION!). The article weaves Teuber's story into a brief history of board games, pointing out that German ones in particular seem to "get it" (in terms of how engaging and dynamic they tend to be).

Board games were pretty much nonexistent for me growing up, unless I was visiting my relatives in Germany each summer – my cousins and neighbors always had a ton laying around, and we played them all the time. Maybe the fact that I was indeed a kid played a part in this next thing, but over there it always felt like I was actually in the game rather than simply playing it. A glimmer of this memory came back when I read that as Teuber designed The Settlers of Catan, he "felt like [he] was discovering something rather than inventing it."


I never realized how culturally significant board games actually were in Germany until tonight – more are sold per capita there than anywhere else. Germany even has a special award for them called the Spiel des Jahres prize, which is a huge deal in the gaming world (the one Teuber won for Catan was his second).


"Part of the reason we don't play much Risk and Monopoly as adults is that those are actually poorly designed games, at least in the German sense"
Two of the interesting differences pointed out between American and German board games are about the dynamic the players have with each other. One difference centers around "conquering your opponent" vs. "having a good, competitive time" (I am paraphrasing).

"Monopoly has you grinding your opponents into dust. It's a very negative experience. It's all about cackling when your opponent lands on your space and you get to take all their money." Monopoly, in fact, is a classic example of what economists call a zero-sum game. For me to gain $100, you have to lose $100. For me to win, you have to be bankrupt.

Instead of direct conflict, German-style games tend to let players win without having to undercut or destroy their friends. This keeps the game fun, even for those who eventually fall behind. *

The other difference is about how engaged each player is throughout all points of the game.

Most of [Monopoly]'s interminable three- to four-hour average playing time (length being another maddening trait) is spent waiting for other players to roll the dice, move their pieces, build hotels, and collect rent. Board game enthusiasts disparagingly call this a "roll your dice, move your mice" format.

[German games] are balanced, preventing one person from running away with the game while the others painfully play out their eventual defeat. And the best ones stay fresh and interesting game after game.

Reading this article taught me a lot about how complicated designing a game is, in general. Statistics, engineering and probability are all taken into account to allow for a huge number of possible scenarios with not a lot of rules (Did you know that there are more potential moves in Chess than there are atoms in the universe? WHAT?!). There are actual such things as board game scholars and game experts (ludologists).



After doing a little personal research, I learned that my two favorite board games as a child were actually not designed by a German, but rather an American named Alex Randolph! Will you look at that. Both games have won Spiel des Jahres awards :)

* One of the reasons for this difference is actually rooted in a broader cultural shift: Violence in particular is taboo in Germany's gaming culture, a holdover from decades of post-World War II soul-searching. Wow.

Mister Impossible

There is a very interesting and insightful mini-interview with Philippe Starck in the September 2008 issue of WIRED Magazine. It starts out with the inspiration for his latest chair, Mr. Impossible, and goes into "green" philosophy (he's actually smart about it too).


What was the inspiration for Mr. Impossible?
The speed of evolution of our civilization and the dematerialization that rules all our production. Take the computer: It was the size of a room, then a briefcase. Now it's a credit card. You cannot dematerialize a chair completely because you must continue to st on it. But you can make it invisible. That's why I made the Mr. Impossible with a double shell – it's basically made of air.

Recently, you have begun to look at the environmental impact of your designs. How does a plastic chair fit in?
The stupidity of the ecological movement is that people kill trees for wood. It's ridiculous. The best ecological strategy is to make products of a very high creative quality, so you can keep them for three generations. I prefer to make a very good chair in the best polycarbonate than make any shit in wood that will be in the trash one year later.


Why not use recycled plastic?
It's a little joke of a material. You can do almost nothing with it. And I also refuse bioplastic, which comes from something that people can eat. Scientists agree that we have a real food problem, a famine approaching. It's a crime against humanity to take something you can eat and make a chair – or use it as gas for your SUV.

How do you reconcile those principles with your position as creative director for Virgin Galactic?
Every project should fit the big image of evolution. You can consider Virgin Galactic as something only for rich people, but you can also analyze the incredible help that it will give us. The exploration of space is a vital part of our evolution. We don't have any future if we don't go into space. This world will explode in 4 billion years. We have time, but not so much.

15minutes?

I got this in the mail last night with my issue of WIRED:



It sounded awesome, so I tried it. They were already over capacity (sometimes I think I get my issues two weeks late because I don't pay for my subscription), which didn't surprise me. But there was still the option to try it anyway for your own "virtual" cover. You get to choose a color scheme, upload a photo (or choose from photos they have), and choose headlines and colors. This was my end result:


It's a cool idea, and would have been REALLY cool if I had been one of the lucky firsts. I wonder if the theme (of the July issue) has something to do with consumer generated content.

There are a few things, though. When you create your cover, you can either email your friends the link or print out your personalized cover. I understand the print-out /Xerox reference, but it would have been great if there was an option to save the file. I had to print mine out and then scan it in order to have it online for others to see. It would have also been cool to generate code for posting to blog /MySpace /yougettheidea, OR a button to upload directly to Flickr. Also, the art direction ended up kind of crap, but I am assuming that's because most headlines on magazine covers are usually designed around the cover image. yes? This is a cool idea, but could have taken so much further. I look forward to seeing more stuff Xerox does.