Yes, that’s my original box, pristine condition. While early 90s NES games were around 130 Euro (counting inflation), this game was 180. Still, my wonderful parents were okay with it, and what a life changer!
[ I posted a very related article about a year ago. This is an update 😉 ]
It taught me most of my starting vocabulary in English. It challenged me with some insane puzzles. And it probably was the only game I finished (I must have been 12-ish?), since I had no patience for skill based games (why am I playing Marathon today? I don´t know). This in a time when Internet wasn’t a thing. You had to call your friends on the landline hoping they would have an insight into why the damn trunk won’t budge.
Maniac Mansion was the game for me. I bought a PC (read: I convinced my parents to buy me one) just for its sequel, Day of the Tentacle. It is most likely the reason I got into programming, computer science, and the entire career that followed. I still dream of making my own point & click adventure today (and I will damn it).
But this is not what this post is about. This is about a song I made back in 2024 with my daughter. A song that tells a story about a girl. A girl obsessed with Maniac Mansion’s main protagonist: Dave. Hoping his mission (saving Sandy) fails miserably. She might have had something to do with her kidnapping as well.
So yes, a fan fiction song. Can´t put a genre on it, but I took inspiration from Jonathan Coulton who made the amazing Still Alive (that you all know from Portal) and also the hilarious Code Monkey, and maybe some Freezepop (they influence my music quite a bit).
So funny (yet dark) synthpop?
It took almost 2 years to get to a state I felt it was good enough for a proper release (that’s almost 2 years of music production class as well). And maybe it took that long because because 2024 sucked. And anything related to that year can mostly be forgotten (one of our cats was ran over, they stole our bike, I had a shitty bike accident, and to top it all off my better half got a diagnosis that changed the rest of our lives). But one good thing came out of it. My first song with my daughter. And it is time more people hear it, damn it (I’m not the easiest producer to work with, that poor thing :D).
She was 11 when she sang this. I kept the innocent vocals for the final release, even though I knew she could sing them so much better today (we have a lot of songs in the pipeline).
Oh, and I did send a version to Ron Gilbert at some point. He replied, and said it made his day. The guy that made Maniac Mansion, the game that set little Sven on a path of games, computer science, and more. I can´t believe I made his day.
Yesterday we officially opened the new AP Gaming Hub, the first of its kind in the beautiful city of Antwerp. To think this all started already over two years ago with two students with the weird names Spider (Olivier Bocklandt) and Ehz (Wesley van der Kraan) asking us to find a way to give esports students a more official place at AP University of Applied Sciences & Arts.
And so my partner in crime Laura Herrewijn and I, we got busy! We’re both gamers, we research games, we pretty much live for games. A cry for help of a gamer could not be ignored!
First up, we helped the students get an online community up and running, recruiting gaming IT students to join our Discord server (oddly enough not all IT students game. Who are you, people!). But soon, students from across the AP galaxy would find their new home.
Next? Hosting the Belgian Student League finals. What better place than our campus which is pretty much the center of the universe, amirite? (Disclaimer: I’m not actually from Antwerp but out of fear of being rejected I fully endorse the idea that everything outside of Antwerp is considered a parking lot). And yes, our Rocket League won <3.
Our Rocket League team kicking ass and taking names at the Belgian Student League Finals 2024
We’re not done yet. What about… an AP Minecraft server? And a little event with free Red Bull! Yes, free energy drinks still attract students like a moth to a flame. Genius! (I need to start handing these out in class.) Our new server (set up by Stijn Voeten) even hosts a virtual copy of our campus, created by our very own Ymke Schoofs. A campus within a campus. Inception at its finest (we are still trying to figure out if we can keep students better engaged in our classes if they lose all sense of reality).
Our Red Bull sponsored Minecraft event attracted students from all over Antwerp.
Meanwhile a new project was slowly taking shape: a place for the gaming student to call their own. A little piece of gaming heaven where they can get together with old friends and meet new,… to hang, play, practice, and compete. A far fetched dream quickly became reality thanks to AP’s understanding of how important gaming can be at so many levels: problem solving, communication, teamwork, creative thinking, .. (Did you know Warcraft raid leading used to be considered a positive skill for applying to management roles?)
So we got together with our colleagues at AP’s Student Center, managed to land a budget, and the ball got rolling. Today, not only do we have a beautiful and cosy gaming space with 5 high-end PCs, a Playstation 5 and Switch 2, and the ability to broadcast games, but we also have an official student gaming community who will be taking care of the hub! (Laura and I can finally take a little break)
Our game PCs in beautiful AP red.
And now? It’s time to game I guess. But not just the students. We will be organising more lecturer VS student events, a couple of in-house tournaments, and more! (Free energy drinks are also welcome, sponsors, contact me;))
To end this long post, I believe a shout out is in order.
First of all of course, Laura Herrewijn, my favorite colleague and researcher. We pwnd this 😀 It took a ton of extra time next to our dailies (excuse my game speech), we’re pretty exhausted, but satisfied. Let’s not do a project like this again any time soon. Still, it was so worth it 😉
Robin and Io, you both jumped in and lightened the load <3.
Of course, everyone who supported us, gave us the extra time, budget, and made things happen in the upper circles Yves, Kelly, Veerle, Wim, Gert, Annick.
A big thanks of course to our principal Pascale De Groote for her support and the inspiring speech at our opening (and at the Game UX Summit!).
Davy and Gary, you guys helped sell the idea and so much more.
Let’s not forget the most important people: our students, whose enthusiasm convinced us we were on the right track, and who supported us all the way.
Little side note: this post was not written in your typical LinkedIn business style. Or soulless ChatGPT style. I thought, let’s make it a little “more human than human”. To keep quoting movies: “why so serious!”
GG all
BTW: Laura and I do all things game ux related. Want to try out biometrics and see how you can make your game even more stressful? Send us a message! 😉
AI seems to be doing everything we do better, and a way lot faster. Be it art, coding, and even music. As someone who dabbles in these three areas, I can’t but be in awe, in fear, and in doubt about the point of all the things I do.
Code Is Code
Sure, I can code. I can’t say I have kept my passion for coding after I quit my last engineering job (2012)1, but even if I had, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with all the frameworks and new trends across all of the domains. I’d be mediocre at most, maybe good at some. But AI does not have that limitation, and that’s a concern if coding is the thing you live for.
Yet I don’t see that much harm. Except for the part where we all lose our jobs as developers and engineers (replaced by a vibe coder running the show.. oh how I hate how that’s even a thing). But we’ve automated engineering over the decades, automating the jobs of many, and programming was just another step. Code is code, and even though one can get creative with code, an accountant app remains an accountant app. For the end user, the actual code, and who made it, does not matter. 2
Just Human
As with coding, art takes effort to learn, to master, but it’s harder to pay the bills. I can draw, some. I can make music. Making one song sometimes takes me months (coming up with melodies and lyrics, recording, getting my daughter to sing for me, mixing, mastering) and it often results in 5 people listening to it once or twice, and that’s it. But there’s a personal satisfaction, the fact that you made this out of nothing. And behind this process, behind the art, there is happiness, sadness, joy, fear,… a series of emotions resulting into that simple 3 minute song you hear.
But AI does it better. And a way lot faster. Thanks to tech like Suno, more music is being generated by AI, with supermarkets being big adopters due to the lower cost. But what is the point of artificially generated music? Art has been a cultural thing (unlike code) to transfer and evoke emotion and messages, to bring people together, to give deeper meaning. It needs a soul. It’s not something you replace by a parrot AI copying thousands of years of evolution to create some song.
My good friend and colleague Slimmii makes AI generated music videos. He’s good at it, and also very honest about it. 23K views at the time of writing….
Sure, AI can make pretty things. I have a collection of saved posts on IG of AI art that I like. But they have little value. I pay for real art, but I can’t imagine people paying for something generated in 30 second on a computer (maybe the crypto crowd though).
This song was months of work. 100 listens.
Brainrot
Social media started off well. People showing off their beautiful pieces of work: drawings, photography, music,.. Instagram was a source of inspiration, SoundCloud and YouTube would give a platform to a creative crowd that would inspire a new generation. Communities were built. But money had to be made. Algorithms replaced your loved posts with an endless stream of worthless, brainrotting content.
Pure consumerism. Ads hidden in trendy posts, and the creation of the “influencer” to further force you to spend money and scroll and disconnect from what really matters. We install time limits on our kids’ devices (I even have a 15min limit on my phone for social media apps), ban phones from schools, but it still feels like a pointless effort. We are fighting large corporations with an infinite amount of resources and we are not going to win this psychological warfare.
AI, Our Savior
But then AI came along, (not that) slowly starting to further poison our already toxic feeds. And that right there, is a good thing. I cannot be the only one being extremely irritated by this extra garbage added to e.g. Instagram, where we have to wonder what we are seeing is even real. And with journalists relying on social media as a source, believing what you see has become a dangerous thing. And sure, an AI video can be funny, but to me it loses its value when it’s not a real person falling face first on concrete while going downhill in a shopping cart….
AI is littering our Internet. It’s littering Spotify, it’s littering social media, it is even littering our news. An Internet filled with generative crap will become a place no human wants to visit. And when we leave, we have AI to thank for bringing an end to brainrot and endless consumerism.
Just a little bit longer, and we will all see each other outside, learning to walk up straight again while listening on our Walkman to that album we just bought last week, made by a real human being.
Yes, AI will set us free.
Oh BTW
Hey, I make music. So here are a few of my latest efforts. A collection of simple video game-ish songs. All human-made, of course.
Notes
0 This post was completely human-made. No ChatGPT or any other AI at all, for no part in the process. The point of a blog is to write. We have enough AI generated articles and books on the Internet. This one, like all my posts in the last 25 years, is from the mind to the pen/keyboard. Mistakes included!
1 I moved to UX and dataviz during my PhD where coding just became a tool to create prototypes to test hypotheses and write papers. I started off as still passionate about developing but soon realized (after being told many times by my mentor) I had to stop focusing on code and start focusing on research. I still like to code video games though.
2 It still remains important to learn the inner working. So to my students: NO, you can’t learn programming relying on AI. Also, if it were up to me all your exams would be on paper! So be glad it isn’t up to me.
Maniac Mansion is one of my favorite point & click, no, dare I say NES, dare I even say video games in general. It taught me the meaning of “It won’t budge”, the dangers of microwave ovens (there’s a reason we don’t have hamsters), and probably inspired my weird sense of humor (I still quote its sequel Day of the Tentacle on a regular basis).
A couple of years ago I started messing around with cheap synthesizers. For my first attempt at a complete song I chose to cover a Maniac Mansion song, the game’s protagonist theme (Dave’s Theme or The Boys Are Still Back, by David Hayes). It wasn’t a great cover, but it reignited my love for music making (first time since 1993). I made more game covers followed by some original work, but after 3 years, I came full circle. Today, thanks to my 11 year old daughter’s fearless singing, and yours truly taking courses at the music academy to get actually better at this thing, we bring you Hey Dave.
Hey Dave can be categorized as fan fiction. We listen to Dave’s ex, who isn’t too fond of Dave heading to the mansion. Not just because she knows it’s dangerous and Dave might die, but maybe because she isn’t such a big fan of Sandy, Dave’s girlfriend who has been kidnapped by Dr. Fred. And Dr. Fred, well, he’s not a bad guy. He just got brainwashed by an evil meteor. Gotta love the 80s and its plots.
My original NES Maniac Mansion box, still in amazing condition (33 years old?)
I do want to thank Ron Gilbert, Gary Winnick and Tim Schafer for creating some of the best games out there and their attempt to keep the genre alive. Playing Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle are still some of my favorite teenage memories. If it wasn’t for those games, I might not have gotten so obsessed with video games. I would have never aspired to get a PhD like Dr. Fred and I would probably be living in my parents’ attic collecting stamps…
An early version of Hey Dave was performed live at our music academy. Our daughter’s first public singing performance (she plays the violin, but dad requested singing and she nailed it).
Currently Hey Dave is only available on SoundCloud, but I’ll probably be sharing it on other platforms soon!
While we wait for more Maniac Mansion games I’ll just sketch and pitch some ideas. What about a cross-over with other LucasArts IPs?
I lost count. I’ve been blogging since 1999 and have been sharing pretty much anything and everything for the last 26 years. The blog, my opinions and topics have changed so much in all those years (I guess people DO change) that I often just get rid of it all every couple of years. I do back up of course, to throw it on the digital pile of memories that will collect electric dust for decades to come never to see the day of light ever again.
With all the things going on in the world, I feel it might be better to keep my digital self mostly on European soil (my physical self as well if we follow European guidelines for travel), so I’ve been cleaning up not only this website but also my social media presence and any websites that’s hosting things I thought was a good thing to share. I deleted my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram account years ago, but I’ll be keeping my recently new Instagram for music purposes.
Random picture of cherry blossoms that I took with my new Polaroid camera. Part of the digital detox, which is the bigger picture behind my social media culling.
But I do miss an outlet, and even though it’s best to keep opinions to yourself, I do want to share a thing or two once in a while. Therefore, this blog/site. Once again. Rebooted.
Expect posts on research, video games and of course my music. Not much to see for now… Just short posts that linked to stories on Medium. I had moved all my blogging there (after a viral deepfakes post made hosting this blog expensive) and well, that’s gone now too.
Anyway, not sure if blogging is still popular. We now all want those 3 seconds video reels on those easy to digest social walls. But here’s to the few who surf the web with a real purpose and full awareness. Welcome fellow human!
Last month, Laura traveled all the way to Canada to present our work on enhancing the game stream discovery experience 🔍🎮 at the CHI PLAY conference. Based on an online survey among game spectators, our paper outlines three design goals that could enhance the exploration experience on game streaming platforms such as Twitch.
Want to learn more? Do check out our poster and paper below, or send us an email!
Laura Herrewijn and I had the honour of organising the first E3: Enhancing the Esports Experience workshop at the CHIRA conference in Rome🇮🇹 last week. Inspiring papers and talks, and what a bunch of wonderful people to connect with. (also, what a great city and amazing food!🍕🍝)
Thanks so much ❤️ and see you at the next one in 2024! 🕹️
Here’s an overview of the papers presented. Shoot me a message if you’d like the full texts!
Title:Initial Developments of Teamwork and Mental Health Focused Minigames for the Purpose of Esports Training Authors:Danielle Langlois , Simone Kriglstein Abstract: Esports professionals have to cope with a lot of stress and really need to be in sync with their teammates in order to perform at their highest capability. As part of an ongoing project, we are working toward a battery of minigames aimed at helping esports professionals train their teamwork skills and improve their mental health. Proposed ideas include modules focused on meditation, teaching coping mechanisms for difficult social scenarios via visual novel, and synchronized breathing exercises. Each of these has pros and cons. With these ideas, we hope to further workshop and develop engaging minigames which can later be user tested.
Title:Power to the Spectator: Towards an Enhanced Video Game Stream Discovery Experience Authors:Laura Herrewijn & Sven Charleer Abstract: Game streaming platforms like Twitch could benefit from more user control and transparency in recommendations. In this paper, we highlight the importance of allowing users to customise their streaming experience through three design goals: Social Interaction, Captivation, and Knowledge Acquisition, the latter addressing both skill improvement and serendipity. We discuss the preliminary results of our on-going iterative and user-centred design process aimed at improving the exploration experience for game spectators. More specifically we report on the results of co-design research to explore the parameters necessary for game spectators’ enhanced control over their game stream discovery experience.
Title:Gamers’ Eden: Gaming houses, their fuctioning, and their role inside the Esports Ecosystem Authors:alessandro franzò Abstract: The current paper aims to analyse the complex array of practices entailed by teams and esports professionals by looking at one of the most peculiar phenomena of the esports field: gaming houses, i.e. the “co-operative living arrangement[s] where several players of video games, usually professional esports players, live in the same residence” (‘Gaming House’, 2022). These structures represent ideal hives to nurture new talents and workspaces for new-fangled professions (Bányai et al., 2020; Freeman & Wohn, 2019), allegedly constituting the prototypical breeding ground for an esports professional (Can, 2018). Representing one of the first attempts to assess the role of gaming houses as emerging esports spaces based on new forms of playbour (Goggin, 2011; Kücklich, 2005) and production of and by users (Hyysalo et al., 2016), the paper comprises an innovative literature review methodology to shed light on how the technological, material, and social elements are enacted through gaming houses’ activities, which mirror the ones entailed by digital platforms (Alaimo et al., 2020). As a matter of fact, through the three moves of encoding, aggregating and computing users’ interactions (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2017), gaming houses (re)produce virtual and analogical goods, translating consumer practices and reshaping the gaming industry by constituting spatialised nodes in the broader esports ecosystem (Hölzle et al., 2022; Yström & Agogué, 2020). Finally, the contribution will critically engage with what is insiders depict as ultimate professionalising tools to see how their socio-material network may represent a privileged empirical ground for assessing how the esports ecosystem adopts new paradigms of work-life balance and users’ production (Hyysalo et al., 2016; Scholz, 2019), thus leading to a further reflection on the nature of play and working practices in our contemporary network society (Castells, 1996).
Title:The Communication Effectiveness of AI Win Prediction Applied in Esports Live Streaming Authors: Minglei Wang Abstract: AI win prediction is widely used in the live streaming of Esports games, with the assumption that it is capable of significantly enhancing the viewing experience and providing valuable information to spectators. However, there is very little empirical research to demonstrate the actual attitudes and feelings of spectators towards AI win prediction. This paper describes an ongoing study from the perspective of communication effectiveness that aims to bridge this gap and explore some possible influencing factors, which could provide a scientific basis for better presenting AI prediction information in future Esports live streaming, thus further improving the viewing experience and engagement of spectators. This study has not yet officially begun on a large scale, so this paper primarily reports primary results from in-depth in-terviews, as a pilot study for the formal survey experiment. The perceived usefulness, the balance between credibility, accuracy, and dramatic effects, and the anthropomorphic image are mainly discussed.
Title:Using Audience Avatars to Increase Sense of Presence in Live-Streams Authors:Tomáš Pagáč , Simone Kriglstein Abstract: Social interactions and the sense of presence are important for the spectatorship experience in live-streams. In large audiences, communication gets harder and viewers participate less. This paper explores the possibility of representing an audience using animated avatars to increase the sense of presence and potentially move some traffic from the chat window to the avatars. We discuss the motivations for and the challenges in creating an audience avatar interface.
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