Back in a post discussing a site update over a year ago, I noted how the work on Subsume had become very much like the work of a social networking site. That observation has finally become a reality, albeit in the beta stages, with the recent release of:

Town Square

and, in particular, a reworked version of the Subsume site at:

game Town Square

The update is an alpha version placed on top of only the beta version of Town Square, so it doesn’t look quite right just yet, but we plan to tweak it all over the next few days and weeks until it works as a suitable replacement for the main Subsume site.

Work will also progress on Town Square until eventually the full game mechanic of Subsume is a seamless part of the experience. It is even possible that other board game mechanics will be supported by the Town Square engine.

It may also come to pass that this blog will be folded in with Town Square, but let’s not bite off that much just yet. For now, we’ll just play around with what the “spatial web” can offer. We hope you’ll stop by and play around a bit yourself, and then let us know what you think.

As more evidence that I haven’t been idle, check the Subsume game site for a recent update. Most notable is the addition of a daily cipher square. I’ve tried some other cryptogram/cryptoquote sites that are out there, but they’ve always seemed to have a clunky interface or limited content. I decided it was worth the effort to code my own keyboard-friendly widget that uses The Quotations Page for updates.

By offering up this effort on Subsume, I hope it serves as a fun incentive to regularly visit the site as other progress is made. It is also a move towards what I previously wrote about thinking of the game as more of a CMS. Don’t worry, I’m not aiming to turn the site into a game portal, but rather I’m just exploring how to present different features using a fractured unit square.

As usual, other projects are pulling my time away from working on the MMO version of Subsume.  What I can take a little time to discuss right now is why I think there is educational potential in the concepts the game explores.  In particular, the use of binary to simplify things.

Many people find math to be a difficult subject.  Part of the reason, I think, is that the common decimal (base 10) system is just outside the range of normal short-term memory.  You can even see this reflected in some of the most ancient tools used for math, like the abacus, where the number of beads used in a line for “working memory” was within the lower range of 7±2.  So while we can use our hands to count to ten, it seems like our minds would prefer to deal with smaller units.

Enter binary, where the units can’t even get any smaller.  You either have a unit (1) or you don’t (0).  From that simple ability to draw a boundary — between up/down, left/right, in/out, yes/no, true/false, on/off — comes the incredible calculating capabilities of modern computers.  Is there a way to bring that simplicity into the classroom, and at the same time bring children who might otherwise have problem with decimal math into the modern digital age?

Let’s start with a simple thought experiment.

1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 6 → 7 → 8 → 9 → 10

If you have a 2-4 year old child, they know how to count to ten like that.  What is also interesting is that such a sequence is completely arbitrary.  That is to say, even a younger child could “count” if they were provided a chart with any sequence of symbols.

Δ → Θ → Π → Ψ → ∀ → ∞ → ♠ → ♣ → ♥ → ♦

All that is important is that they can determine what comes “next”, and that is all a computer has to do, too.  I could ask you to try to memorize that symbol sequence, the same way a child is asked to count from 1 to 10, but part of this thought experiment is to show you that math can be done by simply using the chart itself.

OK, so the chart lets us count from Δ to ♦, but how does that yield simple math, like addition and subtraction?  Because a sequence implicitly represents a difference of one, simply using a chart to refer to another chart allows arithemetic!  For example, what is Ψ + Θ?

We have, in effect, created a very simple slide rule that we can use to do a calculation, without knowing any math at all, by following a simple procedure:

Move the second chart to start after the first symbol given, then find the second symbol on it, and the symbol that matches it on the first chart is the answer.

So our solution is ∞.  In the same way, a chart going in the reverse would allow basic subtraction.  It’s not an earth-shattering concept, but as a teaching tool it gives children a more concrete feel for math than does rote memorization.

Other than there being a chart one/two listing a previous/next value that you refer back/forth to, there is another dimension that binary can make useful.  To be more straightforward, lets get back to using numbers instead of symbols for this next thought experiment.

Let’s say I have two bags full of numbered blocks.  From the first bag I pull two blocks: 4 and 0.  From the second bag I pull four blocks: 2, 1, 5, and 0.  Now I ask you to follow this simple procedure:

Put all the blocks in one pile.  If there are two blocks that have the same number, remove both and replace them with a single block that has the next higher number on it.  Repeat this until all the blocks have different numbers.

So for the particular example given, and I’ll sort and group the digits to make it easier to follow, it would work out thusly:

5421(00) → 542(11) → 54(22) → 543

Did that feel like math to you?  Probably not, but what actually happened is that you worked out the solution to 17 + 39 using binary!  The block’s digits all represent the powers of 2 that make up the numbers (e.g., 17 = 2^4 + 2^0).  So the 543 result corresponds to the traditional binary representation 111000, which is 56.

While that might seem a little confusing to you if you had a traditional education in decimal math, it was in reality something so simple a computer can do it billions of times a second.  Everything was done by directly manipulating the blocks you had immediately in front of you (and the sequence chart, if you happen to be unable to count) instead of dealing with abstractions.

Now it gets really heady: multiplication.  Let’s take the same numbers used above, so we want to calculate 17 * 39.  Using binary we can fairly easily implement it on top of the addition we just learned above by first following this simple procedure:

For each block from the first bag, add its number to each block from the second bag, and place a block numbered with that sum in the pile.  Then follow the same pile procedure as before.

Let’s step through that for our example.  We start with an empty pile and the two bag’s blocks

(4, 0) * (5, 2, 1, 0)

for the first block additions, we get

4 + (5, 2, 1,0) → 9, 6, 5, 4

and the second block results in

0 + (5, 2, 1, 0) → 5, 2, 1, 0

making the full pile

9, 6, 5, 4, 5, 2, 1, 0

Sorting and grouping like we did before gives us:

96(55)4210 → 9(66)4210 → 974210 = 1010010111 = 663

Again, that may seem complex at first blush, but is is something a child could easily accomplish by direct manipulation of blocks.  While it might not be practical for everyday calculations, it is an interesting alternative to forgettable multiplication tables.  And who knows?  Maybe a child struggling with decimal math is a genius in binary.

Unfortunately, I’ve had about as much time to work on Subsume as I’ve gotten feedback on the game (i.e., not much).  Site traffic still shows it being played regularly, but it’s far from giving an MMO like WoW a run for its money.  I managed to find a little free time over the weekend to tweak the site layout a bit, and it left me with a couple game-related thoughts I figured I’d write about.

If you go to the Subsume game site now, you’ll see that it is “inspired” by the game board itself.  The largest square, the index page and representing the entire site, is divided into 4 smaller squares (or just quarters, if you don’t have JavaScript enabled for some reason).  The two on the left show what I’ll generically label here as “brand” and “detail”; aspects that define the game independent of the computer implementation.  The two on the right show what I’ll generically label here as “play” and “pay”, and they are further divided into 4 related subsections.  In theory, everything about the game could be represented on this one page with further divisions giving further detail, with some whiz-bang zooming animations as you clicked around, much the same way that Google Maps does.

So, really, the game is a content management system, and in many ways that means you can think of a CMS as a game, too.  I’m not saying that’s a particularly deep thought, but I really haven’t seen anyone explore the implications of that.  Certainly the language of CMS seems to be the language of business rather than play, as though the bits representing warehouse inventory and user shopping carts somehow vastly differ from the bits representing dungeon monsters and player inventory.  I’m certainly of the mind now to merge game site content with the game itself, resulting in self-referential fractal goodness.  I certainly can’t be the first madman to think of doing this, can I?

In that same line of reasoning, the game represents a social network, so perhaps it is time to start treating social networking sites like games, too.  Many people already seem to do this.  They keep score by counting their friends on Facebook, by seeing if they’re someone’s top friend on MySpace, by finding out how short their LinkedIn connection with someone else is, and on and on.  They don’t seem to act like they know it’s a game, though.  Not even an alternate reality game.  Not even when they directly take steps to game the system or notice that other people are attempting to game the system.

No, they still seem to convince themselves that some arbitrary online ranking is both deserved and important, just as surely as I might like to convince myself that Subsume deserves to be a top 5 result on Google for “8×8 board game”.  Suck it, checkers and chess, you ugly losers!

I’m not saying that visibility in Google is a bad thing, or that all online relationships are superficial games.  All I’m saying is that game design doesn’t always stop at some obvious point.  Inasmuch as Subsume is a game, it will also (unintentionally) be a social networking site and it will also be CMS, and it will likely have major elements of whatever else comes down the pipe being pushed as the next big thing, too.

In short, I guess what I’m saying is that, damn, it takes a lot of effort to write an online game.

The second beta of Subsume is now available.  It mainly enhances the widget experience.  Separate work is being done on the server side to allow more than 2 player games, but it’s not yet ready.  The plan is start rolling those features out on the web site itself, making it work (sans game elements) sort of like a social networking site with a spatial component.

Also, an order for an XO laptop was put in on the first day of the offer.  We have been notified to expect shipment before the end of the year, so further updates to the game interface itself will wait for and target compatibility on that.  If there are any teachers out there who would like to collaborate on a lesson plan that relates to any aspect of Subsume in an educational setting, please contact us!  Otherwise, we would very much like to hear anyone on how we can further improve the game.

When Apple announce the iPhone, I was foolish enough to believe that things would be getting better and not worse. At that time, we decided to target the widely supported “widget” technologies when developing Subsume. It was the way to the iPhone, a way to the desktop, and was expected to be the way to the next generation of iPod. Well the iPod touch is here, but the desire is gone.

The big lie, of course, is that Steve Jobs specifically stated that the reason the iPhone wasn’t more open to developers is that they didn’t want a bad app chewing up the cellular network. Even if that doesn’t sound ludicrous to you (and it should), enter the iPod touch having no such flaws and yet it is still not open. And I’m not even looking for Mobile Cocoa or any such native API! I just wanted to have my widget on the device. Instead, they don’t even let you mount the new iPods for file storage.

The big problem with web apps is that browsers aren’t the best client. It is a pain trying to keep the Safari-ness at a minimum, and it is downright stupid for a game like Subsume to do things like re-download large sound files (or anything else the browser can’t get from its cache). There may be some small advantage to always having access to the “current” version of an app on the web, but it is essentially negated by allowing widgets to sync via iTunes like everything else. It is so annoying that they’ve lied and kept a closed system that I think I’m going to shift focus a bit.

Starting on 12 November 2007, the XO laptop is offering a Give 1 Get 1 deal for $399. While the XO is a very different device, I find the offer results in something better for the same amount of money as an iPhone. It makes “a computer for the rest of us” for a segment of the world population that Apple just doesn’t seem to care about anymore. That Subsume can also be used as an educational game is just icing on the cake. At this point, we see XO as the direction to go for mobile applications worldwide.

Of course, Apple can change it all by releasing Leopard first. Their 10.5 version of Mac OS X is supposed to include Dashcode for doing widget development. If they take that opportunity to unify their deployment process to allow widgets everywhere, then we might be able to forgive the initial missteps they’ve taken with their touch devices. If not, their decision essentially makes their hardware irrelevant from a developer support standpoint.

We finally stopped sitting on it and shoved the widget out the door. Just stop by the Subsume game site and see for yourself. It was written in such a way that the same files can be used as both the web app and the widget. I’m not sure if we can keep up that policy, but I’m going to do everything I can to avoid a lot of back porting or forking for multiple versions.

I was sorely tempted to add a lot of new features and/or make the widget extra pretty, but it is still a beta and right now I want to make sure the fundamentals are there before it gets fancy. Other than getting everything to work with Dashboard, the only other visible change is to use the player unit to progress through phases instead of the red circled x. It’s a much larger target, and allows for some feedback like a progress bar. I also added an FAQ to the documentation, so now is the time to pipe up if anything about the game is confusing you!

It may seem like I haven’t done much recently, but in reality I’ve been feverishly working (read: limping along in a sickly fashion) on creating the widget version of Subsume. It’s mostly there, with many lessons learned, but I’ll still be tweaking and debugging until at least the Apple event next week. With any luck, that will mark the release of a WiFiPod, or what is essentially an iPhone without being encumbered by the cell phone bits (and hopefully an 80+GB hard drive). The iPod is definitely in need of an update using the new technology, and sooner is better than later if they want to hit the back-to-school and holiday buying crowds.

But back to the topic of turning web apps into widgets. It’s definitely a troublesome task if you didn’t start with the plan of making a widget. It also looks like it would be just as painful to create a web app from a widget if you didn’t begin with that intention. You’d think Apple would make it easier, what with them having both Dashboard and the iPhone, but maybe it makes sense somehow to keep a bit of distance between the two technologies. So, for the curious, here is a list of a few best practices when approaching generic Web 2.0 development:

1. Pages are good/bad
   The natural interaction on web pages is to navigate to another page, but widgets (at least with Apple’s Dashboard; other engines might vary) jam everything into a single page. You have to endure the pain of hiding and showing various blocks in that HTML file, and for complex layout like Subsume has, it can be a pain to edit the thing. We also used a standard form to configure the game initially, but with widgets you’re going to have to manage all your server interaction with XMLHttpRequest calls, so plan on using that from the start.
2. Proprietary is good/bad
   Widgets often have their own interface elements you need to use to have them work right, but you can’t really count on any of them being available for the web version. To keep things portable, it’s best not to get sucked in to making things too fancy, and keep in mind how to get results that work in both cases. For example, I added a portable layer that allows the game configuration to be read from either the widget preferences or the web URL.
3. Objects are good/bad
   One big plus I found is that my JavaScript game objects are virtually unchanged in implementing the widget version. As always, it’s in your best interest to decouple things as much as you can so that you can take advantage of OO reuse. My object model is nowhere near perfect, but people writing spaghetti code are really in for a world of hurt if they put the above-noted proprietary technology too deep in their own code.

I think Apple really dropped the ball by not supporting at least widget installation on the iPhone. Not only has it made my job more difficult, it doesn’t really reinforce Apple’s brand or technologies. I can let it slide and make due for this first version of a new product, but they would be smart to quickly unify their “nano-app” development with a common vision across product lines.

After getting sidetracked on higher priority items, I’m finally getting the Subsume beta out there for everyone to try. Network support at this point amounts to being able to play a 2 player game with the standard rule set. If you didn’t have someone nearby and eager to play for as long as you kept the window open, now you can find someone around the world (or maybe just two cubes over!) to play with and we’ll keep the game state on our servers. The only caveat is that if nobody makes a move in over a day we’ll delete the game, so no slacking off over the weekend!

If you don’t know anyone who is a big board gamer, feel free to start a game and post the name here for a pickup match. I’ll even get the ball rolling with “fcfs” (as in first-come-first-served), and I’m most likely to be actively playing 12-02 UTC. A day after the first game is over it will also expire, of course, so there is no guarantee that if you use it in the future it will still be me! Keep in mind that it might also take a while for someone to find your new game, so play it like the casual game it’s intended to be and don’t constantly stare at the window waiting for it to ding when it’s your turn.

Next on the agenda is probably the Dashboard widget. It’s fairly obvious that something designed to work on the iPhone would also work better as a widget than a web page. I think having a widget will also reinforce the casual nature of the game. Until then, unless I find something interesting to write about, enjoy!

No, you didn’t miss it; we failed to get the beta with network support out in time for the iPhone launch weekend. I wish I could say it was because we got one and spent too much time playing with it, but in truth we just hit some snags along the way. I’m going to pretend it was a good thing for the schedule to slip, because it seems like a lot of stuff got overwhelmed by the iPhone release alone. Even now we’re just starting to see scattered reports, just like we expected, of some Web 2.0 techniques not quite working on the iPhone.

We’re not going to let any of this get us down, though, and we’ll keep plugging along. The beta will still be coming as soon as we get some server-side kinks worked out, and what happens after that is anybody’s guess. I’d really like to see Apple actually release some kind of SDK, despite Jobs’ claim one wasn’t necessary, that allowed developers to better target the iPhone. It is quite possible that they’ll roll something in to Dashcode for that. All I can say is that it appears the launch went well enough that the iPhone isn’t a dud, and that the EDGE network appears slow enough that a game like Subsume will fulfill its design goal.