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pawelpiotrowski · 4 years ago

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Most people play popular games — games with predefined boundaries that are played in crowded sandboxes. Popular games are often those with the most short-term, concrete rewards. (..) Hidden games are played in sandboxes that people don’t even realize exist. Hidden games have a higher return, but they are more long-term and abstract.

Playing hidden games allows these innovators to walk to their own tune, to make incredible innovations, and to be camouflaged even when they are well known. (..) I associated speed with being hurried, working long hours, low quality work, and feeling overwhelmed. I was wrong. There was a lot of nuance I didn’t appreciate — nuance like the quote below offers. (..) As I dug deeper, I realized that speed isn’t fundamentally about “doing more” or “running faster.” Rather, it is more a way of thinking.

“Be quick, but don’t hurry.” — John Wooden

“For pretty much any technology whatsoever, the progress is a function of how many iterations do you have, and how much progress do you make between each iteration.” - Elon Musk

“Everybody must realize that if you don’t meet customer demand quickly enough, without sacrificing quality, a competitor will.” - Bill Gates

“The only way to win is to learn faster than everybody else.” - Eric Ries

Both learning speed and execution speed are important, but they’re often conflated with each other. This is a big deal. Execution speed is about getting more done by either putting in more resources or by operating more efficiently. Examples of execution speed include:

Working a longer day

Making decisions faster

Finding a tool that helps you work faster

Making sure people aren’t waiting on one another to move forward

Removing a bottleneck in an assembly line

When most people think about speed, they’re really thinking about execution speed. This is why the idea of speed is associated with long hours and hurry. Learning speed is special in two ways:

Higher leverage. You can 10x your learning speed through compounding and better learning techniques. At most, you can 2x how many hours you work.

Fewer sacrifices. When you work too long, you sacrifice your health and relationships with friends and family.

You can increase your learning speed in several ways:

Spending more time learning

Learning knowledge that doesn’t become outdated so your knowledge compounds

Finding breakthrough knowledge in a sea of info overwhelm

Remembering what you learn so you can use it for the rest of your life

Creating an experimentation engine so you can rapidly try new ideas without procrastinating and without taking on huge risk

Systematically identifying and removing your blindspots

#1. The pace of life is increasing, and our pace needs to increase with it or we will be left behind

the rate of paradigm shift in the world is doubling every 10 years. This means that by 2040, the pace will be 4x what it is now. And in 100 years, it will be 1,024x what it is now.

When we are ahead of others, we are in demand, get promoted sooner, and can charge a premium. When we are behind others, we are the first to be let go.

As the world becomes more global and digital, tens of millions of people will realize that they are further behind than they realized and that catching up feels impossible. The solution is to increase your learning speed now and not wait until you are forced to.

#2. Being a little bit faster can be the difference between winning and losing

Being a little bit ahead vs being a little bit behind is the difference between winning and losing. Therefore, be proactive rather than reactive.

#3. Little gains compound into huge gains

Speed matters because small gains often compound into large gains over time. (..) You can think of speed as being the first to release a minimum viable product to a market or to have a new skill that is really valuable to your employer. This is the first-mover advantage. You can also think of it as how quickly you iterate based on feedback from the market. This is the fastest-iterator advantage.

#4. Speed is the underdog’s #1 weapon

The fact that a startup can disrupt a huge company is startling when you think about it. The big company has tens of thousands of the world’s smartest employees, billions of dollars in profit, and a global reputation.

Changing markets create new customer needs. In other words, customers are always open to a better mousetrap.

New technologies create new ways of meeting those needs. Because those technologies are new, individuals who go all-in early can rapidly become world experts.

Startups don’t have sunk costs, and they can rethink how to solve a new customer need from scratch. Then, they can go all-in on the solution and “burn their boats.” For startups, getting the new idea to work is existential, whereas it isn’t for the large company.

Finally, startups can iterate faster than larger companies. Large companies have multiple layers of approvals and have a brand to protect.

#5. The best career opportunities are often time-bound

Tool adoption. If you’re the first to adopt a game-changing technology in your industry or position, you can use that to stand apart.

Investment opportunities. The earlier you get in on a great investment opportunity, the larger the return.

Cultural shifts. The sooner you realize an important cultural trend, the more you are seen as a pioneer rather than as out-of-touch.

Startup opportunities. Bill Gross runs both the longest running technology incubator and also one of the most successful. Of the 150 companies they’ve started, an amazing 45 have gone public. In 2015, Gross did an in-depth analysis to try and understand what separated the winners from the losers. He looked at teams, markets, ideas, funding, business models, and timing. Amazingly, he found that timing was the #1 key.

Social media. When a new social media platform gains traction, new users tend to be looking for people to follow. Furthermore, it is easier to get engagement. As time passes, users start to unfollow more than they follow, because they feel info overwhelm. Also, as the platform monetizes, it reduces organic engagement and offers more and more traffic on a paid basis.

Skills. When a new skill suddenly becomes in demand, there is a shortage of workers to fill that demand. As a result, employees can earn a premium for having that skill. For example, at one point, programmers with experience with autonomous vehicles were worth over $1 million dollars per year to their companies.

Speed is great in theory, but it’s difficult in practice.

On the one hand, if we keep on top of all the latest tools, skills, social media platforms, and investment opportunities, we can quickly become overwhelmed with no time to do our core work. Furthermore, many of the changes we track won’t end up panning out.

If we are too late, we will miss out on the best opportunities. We also risk being considered out of touch. There is one rule that has helped me find the balance between the two poles in my own life. I call it the Hockey Stick Rule. When I see something grow exponentially in the shape of a hockey stick, (..) at the very least I immediately devote 10 hours to truly understanding it before passing judgement on it. This approach helps me understand what’s happening without getting overwhelmed.

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grammaticalmustaches · 4 years ago

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KETTLE KATCHERZ FEEL FREE TO READ

under a read more due to length oops

suddenly overcome with love for my players. its a constant emotion but im feeling it so big right now.

theyre just so invested in the world! and their characters! and theyre so kind!?! truly i think dnd brings out the best in people.

i gave them some kenku that are having trouble integrating with a community because of the language barrier and now my players are out of game diving into esl education to make a communication book to help them get basic ideas across.

it is an ongoing joke that they adopt every npc i give them and its not much of a joke bc no lie i think there are just as many npcs who travel with the party as there are actual pcs. actually i just counted there are exactly as many party npcs as there are pcs. three of those npcs are kind of just one npc who at one point shared a consciousness but are now separate(-ish) beings and one of those npcs is just a small horde of dust bunnies that occasionally either makes or cleans up messes so you could argue the numbers dont actually line up but it is still an absurd number of npcs to have adopted. i have to plan reasons npcs cant or dont want to go on adventures as one of the first character points i make otherwise their party would be triple its size. i am constantly forgetting how many npcs they have with them at all times but they Dont forget and make points to include them in conversations and decision making.

i just think dnd brings out the best in people!!!

also i lowkey hate making maps but maps are important for understanding the world so iv been doing research and shit and trying to get better at it but! my players literally help with that? not just in making it fun and rewarding but like literally help with the task of it?

as in we just came from a city that one of my players spent a few years at so he drew a map of the city and wrote me out a Huge world building document about the city and its culture and like, climate and neighborhoods and what was important to his character while living there and everything! and another player gave me a six page document that included maps about the territory their character grew up in like, almost at the very beginning of our campaign! i havn’t even had a chance to use any of that information yet because they come from a very far away place! they dont care they Had Fun making me this big old document! and now we’re visiting a player’s childhood home and They’ve offered to make the map for the area! that would be three whole maps all player made!!!

theyre just so invested and make things so easy on me!!! it is so easy to dm a group that is constantly focused on Working With the world and moving their characters forward!

and its a super homebrewed campaign partially bc i honestly think thats not only more fun but how dnd is Meant to be played, with some creativity and making shit up on the spot, but also my players are so good!!! about shit being homebrew!!! when something comes up we dont know the rules for or which rules dont exist for we work together to decide what happens!!! if someone knows a rule i dont they let me know and i can ask them what they think happens given the rules that do apply and we make decisions together on how it works with a focus on what makes the most compelling story!

its just so truly OUR game!!! my beloved comrades!!!

Also like, its been off and on and we’ve taken breaks but we’ve been playing since March 2019? and people have added and left and like i said we’ve had to take breaks but in the end this is not a campaign i can imagine not being in anymore. i cannot imagine this campaign ending just because, like, there’s just so many of them who are so invested!!! and Im so invested! to be honest this campaign is one of the most fun and rewarding things in my life and one of my favorite things about it is how confident i am that it is going to be a constant in my life for a long time. like im really able to just Revel in this campaign and sink hours of work into weird bullshit and plan out arcs and enemies and friends and plot hooks and aesthetic bullshit i dont expect our party to meet for Quite a while because i just! i have no fear that this is going to end!

One of my players got a symbol from our campaign tattooed onto their flesh body? art that i made for dungeons and dragons? it will be on their human body for the rest of their life? and another got a tattoo that (partially) represents what this campaign means to them? another has told me they would love to get a campaign related tattoo with me someday? there is a tattoo in game that binds (most of) the pcs to each other and there has been talk about us getting that tattoo together?

i cannot think about this for too long or i go insane. i made some shapes on canva and spent the whole time wishing i had ms paint because ms paint is my level of art and these are designs that are being added to bodies because we have collectively installed so much emotion and meaning into them.

i am losin gmy mind.

and like, iv already sunk lowkey a kind of unreasonable amount of time (esp for someone who just went back to school and has homework!) into making my kenku soundboard and mixtape but its been such a passion project already and the whole time iv been working on it iv had Zero fear of the reception because i Know and Trust that my players will think my first attempt at using garageband is sick as hell even if its kind of not because they are just crazy supportive and love our world like i cant even really call it my world its truly Our world and! we all love and contribute to it!!!???!!!

I just love my party so much!!!

i just!!! truly think!!! dnd brings out the best in people!!!

at the end of every session we do a rose/bud/thorn (thing we liked/thing we’re looking forward to/thing that could be improved or issue wed like to bring up) to check in with how the session went!!! we discuss things we didnt like and how wed change them!!!

they challenge me Constantly not just in pushing my capabilities as a growing dm but they also speak up and challenge my decisions when they disagree!

i jsut cannot get over how truly we are Working Together in all aspects to make this campaign what it is.

i have a tendency to move dnd at a crawling pace where every hour of every day is meticulously role played. and they told me they didnt like that and now we work together to make things move faster! and it doesnt always work and we still dont move that fast but weve brainstormed several options and tried a few new things to make it easier for me to go faster!

PROBLEM SOLVING INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF GAME

dnd! brings out! the best in people!

and also also also theres like, Multiple players who really hate using technology and sometimes esp video chatting. and most sessions currently people’s thorns have been tech issues/being on video. but wer still all (mostly) show up every session! we still submit to the mortifying ordeal of being seen/heard on discord!

some of my players have an accented character voice and i love them So So So Much for this and it makes me feel confident and comfortable enough to try my best at (when i remember to) doing character voices for npcs but we are not critical role and we are certainly not voice actors so none of our voices are very good or consistent! and my players with accents get self conscious about this pretty often but like!!! they are TRYING!!! they are GIVING IT THEIR ALL!!!

what more could anyone possibly ask of them?

multiple players have come to me concerned and looking for advice/help because they dont think theyre very good at role play/staying in character. we’ve got people who so dedicated theyre stepping Way outside their comfort zone and then turning around and apologizing for how far a walk it was??? they are giving it Their All and their biggest concern is how to give MORE?

i had a moment last session where i realized that our current arc is literally exactly the kind of arc i Dreamed of dming when i was first starting out. like, not to toot my own horn but its legitimately open world and they have a mystery that they need to get to know a small community and find out what everyone knows and put all the pieces together to figure out what happened. i used to scroll through dm forums Endlessly looking for Any advice on how to plan a good mystery and i didnt think id ever be at the point where i could actually pull a mystery Or an open world arc off. but like, here i am. its going pretty great so far.

also this current arc is one of the First i ever thought up for this campaign. obviously it’s changed and evolved a lot since original concept but like. just a Bit emotional over, ya know. finally getting here and having it be even better than i imagined. how far we’ve all come, in and out of game. the fact that my players had so much fun talking to my prize npc kenku whom i have been developing for literal years now and adore beyond reason that they are learning about esl studies to help them integrate into the coven they are trying to join.

DND! BRINGS OUT! THE BEST IN PEOPLE!

COLLABORATIVE STORYTELLING. WORKING TOGETHER TO CRAFT MEANING. LOVING AND SUPPORTING EACH OTHERS CREATIVE DECISIONS. MAKING DICK JOKES.

THIS IS WHAT DND IS ALL ABOUT BABY.

#dnd #for anyone wondering what this super long post is: tl;dr i love my players and our campaign #kettle katcherz #thought i finished writing this very long post #then Went Off in the tags #to the point i got cut off #so i went back and added my tags to the actual post.#sorry not sorry that i just love my players beyond tag limit

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uniformbravo · 7 years ago

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bloop heres a post abt my 3-day trip to san diego B)

this was just gonna be a list of highlights but i ended up talking about a lot so it’s more like a Kind Of The Highlights But I Got A Little Carried Away list

it was a 2 hr drive so i put on some tunes & forced everyone in the car to listen to my thousands of anime ops and piano covers it was *fire emoji* (im not on mobile)

at the end jaelin said she couldn’t hear it the whole time rip

made myself carsick looking at mob psycho memes while we looked for a parking spot at the museum for 20 minutes (it was worth it they were good memes)

the museum we went to had a whole gaming thing going on where they just had a shitload of games out for ppl to play & one of them was just dance projected onto like an entire wall basically & i mean i didnt play but it was fun watching my mom try her best

she played against two of my sisters who both beat her by more than double her score hgdhgksd bye mom

got a nauseating headache in the science museum & took the opportunity to sit down & look at more mob psycho memes for 35 minutes while the advil kicked in

felt better by the time we went to see this fuckin movie about national parks in the us but idk it was like. the whole reason my mom wanted to go to san diego was to see this movie bc they were getting rid of it soon & after seeing it i can see why they’re taking it out kjgkdjgksd like!!! it would’ve been cool if it told u shit about the parks like fauna and flora shit but it had this dumb little narrative abt these three campers traveling to each park & fucking around & i looked over at jaelin at one point & she was asleep & i was like same

im being too hard on it, it was kind of interesting to watch and had some cool visuals but the acting was pretty embarrassing & unnecessary, i wish it would’ve tried to be a documentary instead of entertaining. that’s my Professional Review of this random movie they’re removing forever soon, hope u enjoyed

realized i had more free time at the hotel than i thought i would & v heavily regretted not bringing my tablet to draw aaaaaahhhhh it was ok tho bc i brought my big sketchbook so i just drew in there B)

i’ve been drawing a lot of terukis i think i accidentally discovered a hidden love for him on the midnight shores of the san diego bay

(what i actually discovered is that he’s v easy to project a rly specific part of myself onto hgkdgksdjkgjsdk)

rented bikes to ride by the bay & it was super fun bc i havent ridden a bike in a long time but like. the second half started getting really hard for me & i thought i was just weak shit bc i literally never exercise but then i realized my back tire had gone flat hfdjghsd my legs were..... so sore

also the seat was shaped weird so my ass was sore for the rest of the trip. it’s still sore tbh. i have a bruised ass

went to a model train museum which was pretty cool bc the little towns had little people & jaelin and i were making up stories for them (my favorite recurring joke was pointing out ppl that had fallen over & calling them dead)

after the trains we made a spur-of-the-moment decision to stay a third day to see more museum shit bc why not so we managed to grab a room at a new hotel and #Locked In our decision

on the way to the second hotel we got a flat tire so i was like convinced i was cursed bc wtf it was literally on the same day???

while we waited for the tire repair i got a pink lemonade from taco bell and it was amazing i can’t believe i ever thought piece of shit sprite was worth even looking at over this

ok so i need to talk about the second hotel we stayed at because it was... literally the fanciest hotel i have ever stayed at in my entire 22 year old life

it was a mariott?? but a fuckin Fancy Mariott ok first of all we were on the 19th floor which just..... what the fuck

floor level was the 6th floor, this bitch went underground (though that might have just been the parking garage idk)

the lobby bathroom was like. jesus christ. to flush the toilet u wave ur hand over a sensor??? what’s wrong with just automatic toilets???? why are these toilets so extra????? i couldn’t even get it to work for so long jgkjdkgsd i hate technology

also there were moist towelettes sitting in a neatly folded pile by the sinks like what even. i thought it was paper towels but then it was wet

the lobby also had this fancy-ass bar/lounge where they served starbucks but u had to have a room key to get in i think

in the elevators to get to the rooms you can’t even enter the floor level until you hold your key card against a sensor like what the fuck..... we had to get some strangers to tell us how to do it gjdks i bet if we hadn’t been able to figure it out the elevator wouldve just dropped us 12 floors to our death like Access Denied, Assholes

the room itself was super fucking cramped tho which makes sense like if im gonna be able to afford anything at a place like this u better believe it’s gonna be the size of a damn peanut. it was the fanciest peanut ive ever seen in my life tho

the view was uhh we were directly across from some tall office building so at night u could like see into all the rooms it was kinda cool but also weird

there was a jar of hershey’s kisses on the coffee table when we got there but it was dark chocolate so like get the fuck outta here with that shit how dare you assault Mine Eyes (i ate like 4)

it rly was a tiny room tho and it didnt help that there were 5 of us rip... like there was a main room and a bedroom and a bathroom and already that’s making it sound bigger than it was hgkdjgskd

but even tho it was small it had a lot like.. there was a kitchenette that was big enough for like 1 person to stand there but it had a fridge/freezer, sink, dishwasher, toaster, microwave, cupboards & coffeemaker like there was so much shit crammed in there, this wasn’t no minimalist living space it was just. a lot crammed into one tiny floor plan

anyway yeah it was really bizarre for me to be in a place like that & i just constantly felt like i didn’t belong there but that was mostly my anxiety lol i really dont like being in fancy places in general idk. it was still kinda fun tho

the natural history museum was cool, they had a bunch of animal skulls & taxidermy which i thought was pretty neat. all their dinosaur stuff was in the basement tho which u had to pay extra to see which like. bye

they did have some cool movies tho, they were like nature documentaries, one on marine biology around baja california and the other on animals of the galapagos & those were pretty neat, way better than that national parks shit we saw at the science center jgkdjkskdkdjg

ok so this one’s more of a buildup over the 3 days so im gonna give a lil 3-part summary

day 1: we went to panda express for dinner & i had leftovers so i was like “sweet im saving these for when we get home” (bc the hotel had a fridge right)

day 2: got a rly good burger from a vegan place, my brother got the same one but didnt want his second half so i was like “cool more leftovers im gonna have so much good food when we get home this is perfect”

day 3: fucKIGN LEFT BOTH CONTAINERS IN THE FRIDGE ACCIDENTALLY WHEN WE CHECKED OUT HKDJFLSKDG i was literally so good about it the first two days like when we switched hotels i made sure not to forget them and i held onto them & everything & then halfway through the third day i was like “SHIT”

it’s ok tho bc for dinner that 3rd day we did panda again & i got the same thing so i have the same leftovers again hehehehehe

ok i think that’s basically everything & im not just saying that bc it’s 1:45 am and ive been working on this for like an hour and a half at this point.,.,. overall it was pretty fun, i think i liked the bikes & those animal movies the best... also the drive out bc i got to play my music lmfao (i love sharing my music ok)

anyway the end thank u

#retag later #today posts #oops this is rly long but uhh it was all over the course of 3 days so its fine

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hoorayfornicepeople-blog · 7 years ago

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February 26, 2018

Where to begin? Probably with a deep breath. Two months from today, I will be on a plane back to the States, which means I have reached the half way point. Time certainly doesn’t slow down. Today I went to the immigration office in Kampala to swap my tourist visa out for a student visa, symbolic of some sort of greater permanence, of this becoming a kind of home and less of a quick stop along the way.

This week is probably also the busiest week of the semester so far (or so it feels). Last week was spring break, which I spent on my rural homestay, with a family in Soroti, in the Serere district of Northern Uganda. We left last Friday on the 16th and returned just last night (Sunday). The week left me with an awful lot to process through, which made jumping into this busy week quite challenging. Today, I struggled to balance the need to prioritize processing, with some of the pressing academic tasks that needed to be done. This has been a consistent thread this semester, but it felt particularly heightened today. I spent the week totally unplugged from technology and the rest of the world and reentry last night brought me 169 new emails and zero desire to read any of them. The emotional energy required to talk with people and explain my week to them proved difficult to find. Many of you have already responded to my inability to explain with understanding and grace.

Tonight, in an attempt to sort through the emails remaining unread from last night, I read the notes from the first La Vida training, which happened last week while I was away. (Update in case I haven’t told you— headed to the Adirondack’s to Sherpa in August!!) Per usual with God’s timing, the “devo thought” from the training was so poignant and relevant to my inner dialogue that I could have cried. It was taken from Elton Trueblood:

“The man who supposes that he has no time to pray or to reflect, because of social tasks which are urgent and numerous, will soon find that he has become fundamentally unproductive, because he will have separated his life from his roots….A man has made a step toward a genuine maturity when he realizes that, though he ought to perform kind and just acts, the greatest gift he can give others consist in being a radiant and encouraging person. What we are is more significant in the long run, than what we do. It is impossible for a man to give what he does not have.”

Yesterday, Will had reminded me to give myself permission to prioritize my mental, emotional, spiritual health/need for processing and reflection, even if that meant temporarily setting aside an assignment or other academic task. You know me enough to know that this advice is a tough pill for me to swallow, even though I know it’s true. Today, it was abundantly clear to me that lack of processing, even briefly, was leaving me “fundamentally unproductive,” no matter how much I tried to discipline myself. And so here I am, engaging in one of the most cathartic exercises I’ve ever known, writing. As usual, I am grateful for your willingness to sit patiently and listen while I attempt to sort through the richness of this experience and put it into words.

Spring Break 2k18… last year during spring break there was a giant blizzard. This year, in Sortoti, the average weekly temperature was somewhere around 100 degrees (not even hyperbolizing here). I went into the week expecting I would sleep in a hut, slaughter a chicken, carry water on my head, and milk a cow. I did none of the above. There’s a lesson on perception and expectations in there. When I was dropped off on Saturday, my host mama matter-of-factly informed me— “This week, it will be too hot for activities, but we will prepare food, eat, and sit.” That turned out to be an incredibly accurate synopsis of the week. In addition to the heat, we are currently on the tail end of dry season, which contributed to the lack of activity, since my host parents primarily farm. The third and final factor that shaped the level of activity of the week was that both of my host parents are in their 70s, incredibly strong and fit, but still doing less physically demanding work at this stage of life.

However, here are some things that I did get to do:

Bucket bathed… a lot

Drank 4,000 Nalgenes a day (don’t worry Mom, I stayed hydrated)

Rested

Star gazed

Ate food

Went to church

Visited the village center

Learned to remove the internal organs of a chicken prior to cooking it

Washed dishes

Did laundry

Drank tea

Swept and mopped the house

Learned to cook a lot of things in the outdoor kitchen— posho, lots of different kinds of potatoes, soup, greens, millet/potato/sorghum bread…

Constructed an underground oven and cooked sweet potatoes in it

Rested

Read 600+ pages (spread between three books)

Sat in silence

Listened to the radio

Beat, winnowed, and separated millet

Rested

Ate more food

Visited the neighbors

Sewed pillowcases

Shelled G-nuts

Picked, cut, and ate jackfruit

Spent too much time in the pit latrine after eating jackfruit

Watched thunderstorms from the porch (It rained four nights in a row. Before leaving for the week, Eddie told us the mzungus always bring the rain to Soroti. I thought it was a crazy superstition, but it turned out to be absolutely right.)

Drank more tea

Rested

Picked and ate fresh oranges

My mama’s favorite phrase was “you go rest now,” since my room was like an oven during the day, this usually meant finding the shadiest spot and reading my book or journaling, rather than taking a nap. In combination with the amount of time I already spent sitting in silence with my host parents, or by myself in between other activities, this was wild. Before leaving, I asked people to pray for my ability to be present. God responded by providing opportunities to be present in excess. Retrospectively, the time that I had this week to reflect, contemplate, learn, and rest was truly valuable, but my impatience made it difficult to recognize in the moment. I experienced a week of simplicity, with little urgency. A culture not enslaved to clock time or schedules, but guided by the needs of the present moment, subsistence, and the daily rhythm of the earth. It was simultaneously one of the most challenging, defining, and enriching (still convincing myself of the last part) parts of the week.

The week included some of my most challenging experiences in communicating cross-culturally– navigating difficult conversations, pushing myself not to be dismissive of a differences of opinion rooted in cultural conditioning, doing my best to practice humility and openness, and learning that I have an accent that is at times hard to understand. This is something I still need to unpack, but you can ask me about it if you’re curious.

Much of what I learned this week came through lots of observation and listening. I learned a lot about the historical and current politics of Northern Uganda and it’s rocky relationship with President Museveni, who punishes the region by withholding government resources or using discriminatory policies, because of the imbalance of power based in tribal/ethnic divisions. I learned about theology, community, he education system, marriage, death, parenting, family, environment, land and agriculture, politics, and history all as they’re shaped by the culture and context of Northern Uganda. Detailing each of these would take an incredible number of words.

I also learned about some of the most prominent poverty related issues Ugandans are experiencing, particularly related to education and medical care. Serere is and has been one of the most impoverished areas of Uganda. However, hear me on this. When you close your eyes and picture poverty in Africa, that image in your mind is not a universal representation. I learned that about myself and my own preconceptions this week for sure. I wrestled (and still am, present tense) with the task of attempting to define and understand poverty and all that is wrapped up in that. In the West, one might look at my host parents and consider them poor. But they do not struggle to put food on the table, they sustain themselves through the land they own and the food they grow. They understand conservation, care for what they own, and work very hard. If measured, their land and animals could translate to monetary value that would increase their material wealth significantly. At the same time, in the village this week, I observed acute poverty that has been unmatched by anything in the previous two months. All the while, I was reading “The White Man’s Burden,” a convicting critique by a former World Bank economist of Western involvement in the developing world, particularly through aid, military and political interference, and all forms of residual neocolonialism. I don’t think I will ever stop grappling with the irreparable damage we have done in our pursuits of materialism and power, and our misuse of resources and privilege. This paragraph is insufficient to express my questions and tangled thought processes about this particular topic, but for now, it’s what I’m capable of writing.

By the end of the week, I had more questions than answers. Honestly, what else is new. On Friday morning, we were picked up and drove to Kapchowra, about an hour away, where we spent the weekend. On Friday night, we spent time in intentional debrief, which was helpful, but in many ways only began to scratch the surface of our 25 different experiences. Saturday, we had a day of emotional (but definitely not physical) rest. After a lovely breakfast, we hiked Mount Elgon, an extinct volcano and home to the famous Sipi Falls, one of Uganda’s bigger tourist spots. The ten mile hike was exhausting, but refreshing and breathtaking. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

We had a quick thirty minute respite after the hike before we began a “coffee tour.” Kapchowra is the OG home of the Arabica coffee bean, discovered long ago by a lucky farmer who just wanted to find out why his goats were getting hyper after eating the leaves of some tree with redish colored berries. On the tour, we got to learn about and help with the process of making coffee, from picking beans to pouring a steaming cup and everything in between. Definitely a highlight for me, even if it was a horribly touristy activity. Shown in the photo below is me shelling coffee beans. Not pictured was the slap happy, caffeine induced state my roommates witnessed me in after the effects of having more coffee than I’ve had in two months kicked in. Let’s say I was laughing at everything and didn’t get the most sleep I’ve ever gotten, but it was quite worth it.

On Sunday morning, we hiked to the top of the little hill above the guest house for a small worship service before our departure. I was asked to give a brief testimony about what God has been teaching me in this first half of the semester (in 5-10 minutes??). I spoke about patience. presence, and newness, the ways that He has been revealing my restlessness to me, but it felt next to impossible to come up with some concise summary of the work He has done in me in the past two months (and is surely continuing to do). Thanks for sticking with me and reading this long post to the end. If it feels open ended, that’s because my thoughts are open ended in so many ways right now. I don’t want to settle for a pretty packaged or over-simplified version of the week. In some areas, I settled for brevity in this post, because I don’t want to risk sounding like I have the answers. I know the week was hard; I know the week was valuable. I know it left me with even more to ponder than I already had, which I didn’t know was possible. As I talk with you individually in the coming weeks, don’t be afraid to ask me questions, because they will help me in my pondering, but know that I am unresolved and still figuring out how to understand.

A brief post-script. Some people (not necessarily any of you) have made comments to my USP friends and I that come with a perceived bravery or accomplishment in what we did last week. “You lived in a rural village in Africa?! That must have been so hard, you are so brave!” or something of the sort. All I will say is that I am not brave. My attitude at points during the week was not even in the ballpark of praiseworthy. This whole thing is as far from being about me as possible. I felt like an outsider this week, even though I was being welcomed into a community. Don’t hear me being dismissive of your encouragement. But I challenge all of you to not let your perceptions of African poverty to shape your visions of my experience. I think these kinds of comments, while well intentioned, are rooted in subconscious (read: often distorted) pictures of the reality of a place like this. I hope that as I communicate to you, the things I say will never glorify or manipulate the things I am experiencing as a result of my own pride and desire for affirmation. Please call me out if you ever see or hear this in my words. Thanks again for being in my corner.

All my love,

Abs

Spring Break February 26, 2018 Where to begin? Probably with a deep breath. Two months from today, I will be on a plane back to the States, which means I have reached the half way point.

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athena29stone · 7 years ago

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Personalizing the Curriculum with the Learning Journey Model

Mark Engstrom, Episode 188 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Mark Engstrom shares a personalized model for learning that he calls the “Learning Journey Model.” After students accomplish a core competency, they personalize their learning journey much like the “game of LIFE” board game.

Got 5 minutes? That is all it takes to enter the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow contest. If you’re a US public school teacher of grades 6-12, you and your students just need to come up with a STEAM idea that can help your community. If you’re selected as a finalist, you’ll win technology and prizes to help your STEAM project come to reality.

The entry period ends this week – Thursday, November 9 is the last day! Go to coolcatteacher.com/samsungsolve to learn more. Good luck!

Listen Now

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream by clicking here.

Below is an enhanced transcript, modified for your reading pleasure. For guests and hyperlinks to resources, scroll down.

***

Enhanced Transcript

Improving the Curriculum with the Learning Journey Model

Link to show: www.coolcatteacher.com/e188 Date: November 8, 2017

Vicki: Today we’re talking to Mark Engstrom @markaengstrom Head of Middle School and Upper School at Allen Academy in Bryan, Texas.

The Learning Journey Model

Mark, you are passionate about helping students have control over their learning. Give me an example. What do your students do?

Mark: So… my students know which components of my classes are foundational and what components are collaborative, what components they will have choice on and what they’ll get to choose from when it’s time for assessments.

I think of the Learning Journey more like the game of life and less like a traditional syllabus where teachers dictate what’s going to be taught, when it’s going to be taught, how you’ll be graded, how you’ll be penalized, the resources you have to use. I prefer to give kids a path, and let them choose from within that path what works best for them.

Vicki: OK, did you say that they get to choose their assessment?

Assessment in a Personalized Classroom

Mark: So they do get to choose. They have a variety of passion-based projects they get to pick from. Within the assessments, there are six questions, and they do three of them. They have five different chances to take the assessment, so the idea is that there’s choice within the assessment, and there’s choice about when they want to take the assessment.

Vicki: Okay, so are all the assessment tests, or do you assess other ways?

Mark: I assess in other ways as well. We’ve got MAP quizzes, we’ve got content-based knowledge assessments, so there are some other some other ways.

Vicki: OK, so there are some teachers sitting here saying, “OK, so you’re coming up with four different ways to assess? That sounds like a whole lot of work!”

Mark: It is! But once you get your kids trained to sort of think, “OK. I’m learning for learning’s sake. I’m going to be assessed in a whole bunch of different ways, and I will have choices,” then they are really feeling empowered.

It becomes less about “playing school” and more about, “How much can I learn? What more can I learn? What don’t I know? Who can help me? Where can I go online to get better? Who in the class can help me? What do I need to ask the teacher?” It makes them the agents of their own learning, and it is fantastic!

Vicki: Do you have a learning management system that helps you keep up with all this?

How does this relate to your Learning Management System?

Mark: We do. It’s called PowerSchool. The reality is that it’s a round-peg-square-hole kind of situation, because I don’t want to manage their learning. I want to inspire them, I want to spark inquiry, I want to answer their questions, I want to give them resources. So the whole idea of a learning management system? I just think it’s flawed. We shouldn’t be managing their learning, we should be sparking it.

Vicki: OK, but you use that to track it and hold it all together? I use PowerSchool Learning as well. I think I’d have to say that they do sponsor some of the work that I do, so I do have to say that.

So, OK. So what class in particular… You’re Head of School, but are you also teaching a class, or is this the model in all of the classrooms for your students?

Mark: So I’m the Head of our Middle and Upper School. We’ve got a Head of School who’s in charge of the kit and kaboodle of Pre-K through 12. So, in my two divisions, Middle and Upper School, we’ve got five classes that now use the Learning Journey model.

Vicki: OK. So is this something that you invented, or where’d you find it?

Mark: I went to some professional development that made me rethink the way we do school. And I kind of landed on the Game of Life that I wanted to use. So, yeah, I came up with it.

Vicki: OK. And we’ll share in the Shownotes , you’ve got some infographics about how you structure your syllabus. (See above.) You completely changed the syllabi for these courses, haven’t you?

Mark: Correct. Can I just talk a little bit about how the Learning Journey works, so it’s clear to people?

Vicki: Yeah! Help us

Mark: So, if you’re looking at the infographic, (see above) basically the top left is Goal Setting. You can follow the white arrows all the way down. It kind of forms maybe two “S”-shapes. Along the way, there’s Artifacts and Reflections and Goal Setting. Kids are always thinking about, “What did I do that’s awesome?” or “What did I do where I struggled?” or “What do I do when I want to do it better?”

And “What did I do that was collaborative? Where can I get an artifact that sort of encapsulates this segment of my learning?”

And then they write a little paragraph about it. I comment on that.

So it’s not just about the learning. I tell kids, “The hidden curriculum is YOU.”

We talk about geography, and I care about geography. But what I really care about is, “What are you learning about how you learn best?”

And so, the first part is foundational learning. That’s the blue part. In every class around the world, teachers could identify the non-negotiable pieces that lay the foundation for deeper thoughts. Those pieces are in my Foundational Learning segment.

Then there’s Collaborative Learning, which looks like what you would imagine it should look like for any collaborative project.

Then we move into a personal segment where they do a Passion-Based Learning Project.

The final segment of the class is getting ready for the assessments.

Vicki: Are all the kids operating at a different speed?

How the personalized approach works

Mark: We work on trimesters. The first trimester we kind of all go at the same pace. But then in the second and third, I really let them loose. Some kids really fly, and you realize that they’ve been shackled by the traditional methods of teaching and whole-class instruction. And it is awesome to see kids just take off on their learning.

Vicki: What happens, though, when you have some people who’ve covered a lot more material than others, and then you go back to this, “OK, these folks have class rank.”

Class Rank and Traditional Grading in this model

Is it fair if somebody covers eight more chapters than somebody else?

Mark: What do you mean by “class rank”?

Vicki: Well, in high school, do you have first, second, third, fourth in your class, or do you not do that at your school?

Mark: We have to do that for the state of Texas, because it affects admissions policies. But other than that, we don’t need to.

I mean, I see your point. There are kids who go above and beyond. But this isn’t a system that’s geared to satisfy other components of traditional education.

Vicki: Ahhhhhh….

Mark: I’m trying to drill down to what does research say about agency? Like if you look at Daniel Pink, Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose… the Learning Journey is full of autonomy and purpose options. That’s kind of the driving force.

Vicki: So… you… are just reinventing school!

Mark: That’s what we’re trying to do.

Vicki: Do you get any pushback?

What pushback do you get with the Learning Journey model?

Mark: I’ve presented this at conferences before, and I’ve written about this. Some people will write in and say, “Wow, that’s great!” But I get very few people who actually want to jump in. I think right now there aren’t enough incentives for teachers to take the time to overhaul their class. Whether their principal wouldn’t appreciate it, or they team teach with people who aren’t interested — I just think there aren’t enough incentives out there right now.

But I would say that any teacher out there, who’s really looking to get re-energized around student learning and the experiences that they’re offering their kids? They’re more than welcome to reach out to me. I’m on Twitter, and I’d be happy to talk through the first couple steps of the Learning Journey.

Vicki: Mark, the truth is that we’re going to end up where you are at some point. We can either aggressively go after it and become part of the change, or the change can be done to us.

You’re either a victim or a victor when you’re dealing with change.

This whole personalized learning approach is really where we’re moving. I mean, would you agree with that or disagree with that?

Mark: Amen. I think you’re spot on.

30-second elevator pitch for the Learning Journey model

Vicki: But it’s just hard. I’m trying to get my arms around it. What do you think… If you were stuck in an elevator with someone who was in charge of the curriculum for one of the biggest districts in the country, and you had one minute to sell this approach of the Learning Journey model. What would you say?

Mark: I’d probably start by asking them, “What’s the number one thing they want to change about student learning in their school district?”

And, depending on their answer, I would chime in that there are different parts of learning journeys, or personalized learning, or digital tools that can accomplish what they’re hoping to accomplish.

And if I had a whiteboard or my infographic at the ready, I would kind of walk them through how the Game of Life — which allowed you to make choices about going to college, having a wife and family, investing in stocks — I mean, that same sort of board game path is applicable to giving students agency over what they want to learn and how they want to learn.

Vicki: So what’s your greatest, “AHA!” moment from this whole process?

Greatest Aha Moment

Mark: ASo I think the “AHA!” moment is that we don’t need to move students through the old industrial model of teaching. It’s easy to do flipped class learning and see how that works. It’s easy to do Project-Based Learning and see how that works. But all of those things feel to me like piecemeal or part of the answer. Whereas I hope the Learning Journey is more of a holistic approach to giving students control. I think that would be my “AHA!” moment.

Vicki: What do you think is the biggest mistake you’ve made in this journey?

Mistake in Personalizing Learning

Mark: The first step I made was to get rid of all content as a requirement. I gave kids too much choice to start. I got a lot of pushback from parents saying, “We don’t know what to study.”

I wish I hadn’t started there. I wish I had started smaller, and given kids choice and trimmed back the content instead of giving them total choice over what they study.

After the Foundational Learning piece of the journey, they really do have total control. So I’ll have some students who only do politics. Or only do environmental stuff. Or only do economics. And I didn’t do that well the first time.

Vicki: I love that you admit — I think that this is important for the transparency — saying, “This is what I did right, This is what I did wrong.”

Your Learning Journey model really is a journey, for you.

Educators, you’re definitely going to want to check the Shownotes for the infographics and the links to Mark’s site.

We love to feature brave, remarkable educators on the 10-Minute Teacher to really provoke your thinking. This is the direction that I think that we’re all going to be heading.

It sounds complicated. It sounds hard.

But I’ll tell you this — we cannot let the fact that something is challenging keep us from doing it, because we’re talking about lives here.

If it works, we need to consider it.

So let’s take a look at the Learning Journey model, and see what we can learn from it.

Transcribed by Kymberli Mulford

[email protected]

Bio as submitted

Mark Engstrom is an Educational Consultant, Blended Learning Designer and the Head of MS/US at Allen Academy in Bryan, Texas. He has presented on digital and personalized learning through Independent School Management, Association of American Schools in South America and Association of International Schools in Africa. He has also written for EdSurge, Getting Smart and Teachers Matter. He has helped teachers from all over the world make learning more engaging for their students. Feel free to connect through Twitter @markaengstrom

Twitter:@markaengstrom

Author of

Blending Alone- http://www.gettingsmart.com/2014/01/blending-alone-blend-non-blended-environment/

Redesigning the syllabus to reflect the learning journey- https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-09-10-redesigning-the-syllabus-to-reflect-the-learning-journey

Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.) This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post Personalizing the Curriculum with the Learning Journey Model appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

from Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog http://www.coolcatteacher.com/e188/

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trendingnewsb · 7 years ago

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The coming of a fully automated society has led some Silicon Valley execs to extreme measures

Image: tristan quinn / bbc

Until a couple of years ago, Antonio Garcia Martinez was living the dream life: a tech-start up guy in Silicon Valley, surrounded by hip young millionaires and open plan offices.

He’d sold his online ad company to Twitter for a small fortune, and was working as a senior exec at Facebook (an experience he wrote up in his best-selling book, Chaos Monkeys). But at some point in 2015, he looked into the not-too-distant future and saw a very bleak world, one that was nothing like the polished utopia of connectivity and total information promised by his colleagues.

SEE ALSO: This is for you, Elon Musk: 5 threats to humanity greater than artificial intelligence

“Ive seen whats coming,” he told me when I visited him recently for BBC Twos Secrets of Silicon Valley. “And its a big self-driving truck thats about to run over this economy.”

Antonio is worried about where modern technology especially the twin forces of automation and artificial intelligence is taking us. He thinks its developing much faster than people outside Silicon Valley realize, and were on the cusp of another industrial revolution that will rip through the economy and destroy millions of jobs.

“Every time I meet someone from outside Silicon Valley a normy I can think of 10 companies that are working madly to put that person out of a job.”

Antonio estimates that within 30 years, half of us will be jobless. “Things could get ugly,” he told me. Its very scary, I think we could have some very dark days ahead of us.”

Think of the miners strike, but in every industry. People could be be driven to the streets, he fears, and in America at least, those people have guns. Law and order could break down, he says, maybe there will be some kind of violent revolution.

So, just passing 40, Antonio decided he needed some form of getaway, a place to escape if things turn sour. He now lives most of his life on a small Island called Orcas off the coast of Washington State, on five Walt Whitman acres that are only accessible by 4×4 via a bumpy dirt path that just about cuts through densely packed trees.

Instead of gleaming glass buildings and tastefully exposed brick, his new arrangements include: a tepee, a building plot, some guns, 5.56mm rounds, a compost toilet, a generator, wires, and soon-to-be-installed solar panels. It feels a million miles from his old stomping ground.

Former Facebook executive Antonio Garcia Martinez at his remote island hideout, ready in case automation causes social breakdown

Image: tristan quinn / bbc

Antonio isnt the only tech entrepreneur wondering if were clicking and swiping our way to dystopia. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and influential investor, told The New Yorker earlier this year that around half of all Silicon Valley billionaires have some degree of apocalypse insurance. Pay-Pal co-founder and influential venture capitalist Peter Thiel recently bought a 477-acre bolthole in New Zealand, and became a kiwi national to boot.

Others are getting together in secret Facebook groups to discuss survivalism tactics: helicopters, bomb-proofing, gold. Its not all driven by fears about technology terrorism, natural disasters, and pandemics also feature but much is.

According to Antonio, many tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are just as pessimistic as he is about the future theyre building. They dont say it in public of course, because whats the point. Its inevitable, they say; technology cant be stopped. Its a force of nature.

Even just a couple of years ago, this would have sounded like just another exhibit in the long-tradition of American dystopian paranoia. But the robot jobs apocalypse argument is starting to sound more reasonable by the day.

“Ive seen whats coming, and its a big self-driving truck thats about to run over this economy.”

The Economist, MIT Review, and Harvard Business Review have all recently published articles about how the economy is on the brink of transformation. President Obamas team suggested driverless cars would dispense with 3 million jobs pretty soon. According to the Bank of England, as many as 15 million British jobs might disappear within a generation.

I blame Hollywood for our lack of preparedness. Thanks to Blade Runner, Terminator, Ex Machina and the rest, artificial intelligence is now synonymous with sentient robots taking our jobs, our women, or our lives. Forget all that.

The A.I. revolution comes in the less sexy form of machine learning algorithms, which essentially means giving a machine lots of examples from which it can learn how to mimic human behaviour. It relies on data to improve, which creates a powerful feedback loop: more data fed in makes it smarter, which allows it to make more sense of any new data, which makes it smarter, and on and on and on.

Antonio thinks were entering into this sort of feedback loop. Over the last year or so, various forms of machine learning technology, teamed up with robotics, are making inroads into brick-laying, fruit-picking, burger-flipping, banking, trading, and driving. Even, heaven forbid, journalism and photography. Every year will bring more depressing news of things machines are better than us at.

New technology in the past has tended to increase markets and jobs. In the last industrial revolution, machinery freed up humans from physical tasks, allowing us to focus on mental ones. But this time, A.I. might have both covered.

Machine learning can, for example, already outperform the best doctors at diagnosing illness from CT scans, by running through millions of correct and thousands of incorrect examples real life doctors have produced over the years. Potentially no industry will be untouched.

Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, 27 year old founder of Starsky Robotics who are using $5 million of investment to develop self driving trucks.

Image: tristan quinn / bbc

The latest wave of machine learning is even smarter. It involves teaching machines to solve problems for themselves rather than just feeding them examples, by setting out rules and letting them get on with it. This has had particularly promising results when training neural networks (networks of artificial neurons that behave a little like real ones), using an approach called deep learning.

Recently, some neural network chatbots from Facebook were revealed to have gone rogue and invented their own language, before researchers shut them off. These simple chatbots were given a load of examples to spot basic patterns in human communication, and then conversed with themselves millions of times in order to figure out how negotiate with humans. What followed appeared as a stream of nonsense:

Bob: i can i i everything else.

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

No human, with the possible exception of one Chuckle Brother, talks like this. But the failed experiment proved an important point. It seems these chatbots had calculated, within the parameters of their task, and without human intervention, a more efficient way of negotiating. This is the essence of deep learning: coming up with new ways to tackle problems that are beyond us.

In the same week, Elon Musk (who believes A.I. is a great threat to humanity) and Mark Zuckerberg (who does not) got into a public row about the risks of letting A.I. like this loose. Zuck said Musk was irresponsible. Musk said Zuck’s understanding of the subject was ‘limited.’ But this misses the point.

A.I. is not about to go Skynet on us. These chatbots hadnt developed some sinister secret language. But mega-efficiency or neural network problem solving might be just as disruptive. True, some of the recent fear about the coming age of the robots is probably overdone. Were not all about to be turfed out by bots. And weve always had disruption: people were warning about a jobless economy 50 years ago too. Weve always found new jobs, and new ways to entertain ourselves.

Around half of all Silicon Valley billionaires have some degree of apocalypse insurance.

Let’s not forget the wonders of A.I., such as dramatically improving how doctors diagnose, which will certainly save lives. It will stimulate all sorts of exciting new research areas. Replacing people with machines will have other benefits, too: driverless lorries would almost certainly be safer than exhausted driver-full ones.

The most likely scenario, reckons Antonio, is a gradual dislocation of the economy and an accompanying escalation of unrest. David Autor, an MIT economist, reckons we could be heading toward a bar-belled shaped economy.

There will be a few lucrative tech jobs at the top of the market, but many of the middling jobs trucking, manufacturing will wither away. They will be replaced by jobs that cant be automated, in the low paid service sector. Maybe there will be new jobs who imagined app developer would be a profession but will they be the same sort of jobs? Will they be in the same places, or clustered together in already well-off cities?

Drivers alone taxi or truckers make up around 17 percent of the U.S. adult work force. Taxis are often the first jobs for newly arrived, low-skilled migrants; trucking is one of the reasonably well-paid jobs for Americans that are not highly educated. What are they going to do instead? Are the cashier operators, and burger flippers going to retrain overnight, and become software developers and poets?

At the very least it seems economic and social disruption and turbulence as we muddle through are likely. The whole shape of the economy could change too. Some worry about the possibility of growing inequality between the tech-innovators who own all the tech assets and the rest of us. A world where you either work for the machines or the machines work for you.

What does that mean for peoples sense of fairness or agency or well-being? Or the ability of governments to raise taxes? The Silicon Valley survivalists fear that, if this happens, people will look for scapegoats. And they might decide that techies are it.

Jamie Bartlett outside Apples new $5 billion HQ

Image: Tristan quinn / bbc

One of the questions I asked as part of this programme is whether we are prepared. We dont even know how little we know; and our politicians seem to know even less. I found one mention of artificial intelligence in the 2017 party manifestos.

When asked recently about the future of artificial intelligence and automation, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin replied that its not even on our radar screen and that hes not worried at all. A couple of months back his boss climbed into a huge rig wearing an I love trucks badge, just as nearly everyone in Silicon Valley agreed that the industry was about to be decimated.

Antonio told me in the race between technology and politics the technologists are winning. They will destroy jobs and economies before we even react to them.

Still, guns and solar panels? Survivalism seems like overkill to me. “What do you have?” Antonio asks, fiddling around with a tape measure outside his giant tepee. “Youre just betting that it doesnt happen.”

Before I can answer, he tells precisely me what I have: “You have hope, thats what you have. Hope. And hope is a shitty hedge.”

WATCH: This beautiful 32,000-square-foot mural was just unveiled in Rio

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symbianosgames · 7 years ago

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[In this classic March 1998 postmortem reprinted from sister publication Game Developer magazine, Ensemble Studios reveals the story behind seminal PC real-time strategy game Age Of Empires.]

I had an experience in a local computer store recently that caused me to burst out laughing. I had stopped to self-indulgently admire the top-ten PC games display when I overheard the following exchange between two young men:

"What do you think about this one, Age of Empires?" wondered the first.

His companion shot back, “Aww, the Borg at Microsoft just combined Warcraft and Civilization to cash in on these kind of games.”

Always eager to boost our sales, I took this opportunity to tell the young men how AoE wasn’t the creative product of a giant corporation, but of a small group of talented people living right in their own backyard.

For us, Age of Empires was not only a game of epic proportions, it was an epic journey for a small band of people determined to turn an idea into a real game company. Along the way, we laughed, we cried, we consumed pizza and caffeine, and we learned a great deal about making games.

Designing the Past Perfect

Obviously, Age of Empires didn’t start out looking like the final product. Despite some accusations, Dawn of Man (AoE’s original title) wasn’t created to be a Warcraft II clone. (In fact, Warcraft II wasn’t released until after AoE’s development was well underway).

Instead, the final design was evolved and refined over time, with a few significant design events along the way. One of the best things I think you can have in a game company is a staff that plays a lot of different games.

This was true of our staff at Ensemble, and was helped in no small part by programmer Tim Deen’s habit of buying and actually playing almost every new PC game as it came out. It was Tim who brought Warcraft II to the attention of the rest of the Ensemble staff. At that time, many of AoE’s game elements, such as resource management, empire building, and technology research, were taking clear shape.

However, we didn’t really know what to do about combat. Warcraft II was a splash of cold water in the face, waking us up to how much fun real-time combat could be. Several times a week, the staff would stay late to play multiplayer Warcraft. These impromptu events continued until AoE reached the point in development when it became more fun to play than Warcraft.

Another major shift occurred a little over halfway through development, when the designers were looking at AoE’s localization plans. They realized that AoE would be sold in Asia, but didn’t include a single culture from that region.

We held a company-wide meeting and decided to add early Asian civilizations to the early European, African, and Middle-Eastern tribes that we’d already developed. Though the addition would create more work for the artists and designers, the enhanced appeal that the game would have in Asia would make this a profitable decision.

All of these changes occurred because the game’s designers weren’t afraid of taking design input from the rest of the staff. Making a game that everyone would be proud of and would want to play was something that got more than just lip service at Ensemble. Perhaps the best example of this core value is the Wonder, the penultimate building that a player can build and use to win the game.

In early 1997, AoE was great for slugfests, but everyone felt that the game play needed to offer something more. Numerous ideas were tried and rejected. Then Mark Terrano, our communications programmer, hit upon the idea of building an “Armageddon Clock” that would force players to drop what they’re doing and respond to the new challenge. AoE is chock full of little ideas and touches that were thought up by the artists and programmers. This participation tangibly increased the sense of ownership and pride that we all took in the game.

One of things that is truly underappreciated about the designer’s job is play balancing. The designers spent months and months adjusting costs, strength, speed, and many other statistics in an effort to create a game that was fun to play and yet didn’t offer any loopholes or cheats.

At this point, I realized that Tim Deen was truly a gamer’s gamer. During development, if any of the various iterations of AoE’s design opened up a way for one player to take advantage of another player and thus make the game one-dimensional, Tim would find it.

And when we didn’t believe his assessments, he would promptly show us by using the loophole to kick our butts at the game. For the better part of a year, play balancing was a prominent task, and it paid off in giving AoE more staying power and better game play than many others in the recent crop of real-time strategy games.

Blazing the Multiplayer Path

Multiplayer support was an integral part of the early design, and AoE was structured in such a way that most of the game could not differentiate between human and computer players. When DirectX first came out, it appeared that DirectPlay would be the best choice for providing communications over the widest variety of connection types.

To support a high number of moving units, we went with a modified game synchronous model, where the entire game is simultaneously run on all machines. Only moves, changes, and commands are communicated to other machines. This approach has the advantage of minimizing the amount of data that has to be sent.

The unanticipated danger of using this model is that it can generate a condition where the game on one machine becomes out of sync with the game on other machines. This caused some very hard-to-reproduce bugs with AoE.

Load metering, the process of determining how much bandwidth the game updates required, was done before the computer AI was completed, and was based on the data flow model taken from human players. As a result, we initially missed the fact that computer players would sometimes issue large numbers of commands in quick bursts.

We did, however, address this oversight with the first patch. An area where AoE’s communications worked out better than expected was the game’s ability to dynamically adapt to latency. A sliding window delays the actual game time when a command takes effect, so that all players receive the command and do not have to pause before executing it.

The problem of handling players who have dropped from a game presented Mark Terrano with difficult challenges. Since drops are unpredictable, usually there is no way to know what happened. The problem could be the game logic, Winsock, the physical connection, or the ISP, and could exist on either the sender’s or receiver’s side. Getting the game to handle drops by anyone at anytime required a great deal of work.

One of the lessons learned from the multiplayer experience was to make full use of communications testing tools, such as automated logs and checksums. Also, we discovered that creating a simple communications data flow simulator program could provide great benefits and isolate the communications code from the rest of the game.

DirectPlay also turned out to be problematical. Difficult-to-reproduce bugs, quirky behavior, and poor documentation made the going more difficult. Guaranteed packet delivery for IPX was one of the more notable examples. At the CGDC, Microsoft promised to deliver this feature with DirectX 5 and even included in the beta.

However, when DirectX was actually released, this feature was nowhere to be found. The cost of that one missing item was the extra time we had to spend writing our own guaranteed delivery system and a bad packet generator program with which to test it.

Painting the Scene

All of the 2D sprites in AoE began life as 3D models. Age of Empires contains 20MB of in-game sprite graphics. Even though all of the displays are 2D, we decided early on that all of the graphics in the game would be taken from 3D models. We used 3D Studio and 3D Studio MAX for art production.

Because 3D rendering is so time-consuming, each artist was issued two machines each, both usually 200MHz Pentium Pros with 128MB of RAM, which at the time was better equipment than the programmers were using. The objects in the game were created as 3D models that had anywhere from a couple thousand to 100,000 polygons. The models were then textured, animated, and rendered out to a .FLC (Autodesk Animator) file with a fixed 256-color palette.

So far, the process I’ve described is identical to that of many other games. At this point, however, the artists added another time-consuming step. The .FLC files were handed off to a 2D specialist, who took the animation apart frame by frame and “cleaned up” each image with Photoshop.

The clean-up process involved sharpening detail and smoothing the edges of the irregular shapes. Since most of the sprites in AoE had screen dimensions of only 20 to 100 pixels in each direction, the visual quality improvement that we realized was significant. When AoE was shown at the 1997 E3, the artists received numerous compliments on their work from their peers at other companies.

The choice to go with 3D models for the in-game objects provided benefits for other art needs, as they were readily available for use in the static background scenes that appear on the menu, status screens, and the various cinematics. The cinematics, including the three-minute opener, were a fulltime project unto themselves.

The 256-color palette (actually 236) used in AoE was something of a problem. The palette was chosen and set in stone at the very beginning of the project, before most of the models and textures had been created. As a result, it turned out that some portions of the color spectrum, such as browns for wood textures, had too few available colors to get the best visual quality.

The palette wasn’t revised during the development process because that would have required rerendering and touching up every image in the game ‘ far too expensive time-wise. On the other hand, the palette did have a wide and balanced range of colors, which contributed to the overall bright and cheerful look of the game’s graphics. If we do another 8-bit color game, we’ll generate the palette at a point further along in the development process.

Going for Speed

Performance is an issue for all but the simplest of games, and it certainly was for AoE. When I joined Ensemble, the game was still in an early form and slow. The two biggest problems were the graphics engine (which was just plain slow) and various update procedures, which produced occasional pauses of up to a second in game play.

If we were going to sell to anything but the most cutting-edge systems, some serious optimization was in order. The story gets personal here, as I did a great deal of the work on this part of AoE.

I started by trying to get a handle on what the over 100,000 lines of C++ code did (the source would rise to over 220,000 lines before it was finished). After spending a few weeks studying what we had, I proposed a major overhaul of the graphics engine structure, including writing a major portion in assembly.

AoE’s original design team asked if the frame rate of a benchmark scenario could be raised from its current 7 - 12 fps to 20 fps. I told them yes. Inside I was sweating bullets, hoping that I could deliver that much improvement.

I couldn’t just go ahead and rip out the old graphics engine, as it would hold up everyone else, so I spent the next five months working mostly on the new engine. Along the way, I managed some incremental improvements that upped the frame rate to 10 - 14 fps, but the big breakthrough came during an all-nighter, when the last piece of the new design was put into place.

Much to my surprise, the benchmark scenario was now running at 55 fps. It was exciting to come back into the offices the next day and see the formerly sluggish animation running silky smooth. But my work was not all on the graphics engine.

I also spent a great deal of time identifying and optimizing myriad processes in the game. Since the game was real-time, many improvements involved spreading out a process over several turns rather than of stopping the game until it completed. In the end, the optimizations paid off handsomely and allowed us to raise the default resolution from 640x480 to 800x600.

A practical lesson that I learned from this experience was how much additional overhead and slowdown a game can acquire as it approaches completion. Often, early in a game project the engine will show great performance but the game’s not finished. When you replace the simple test levels with the complex final levels, add all the AI, UI, and bells and whistles, you can find a world of difference in actual performance. This was true for AoE as well. As we approached completion and all of the loose ends were tied off, many of the performance gains were traded in for new features.

Things That Worked Out (S)well

1. The Game was broken into separate engine and game components. About halfway through development, there was concern that the code base had expanded far enough beyond the initial design in some areas that every new change and addition would look like an ugly hack. Lead programmer Angelo Laudon and Tim Deen took two weeks and separated the code base into two separate sections, the general engine (Genie), and the game itself (Tribe).

The conversion was very successful and allowed the AoE programmers to retain a nicely object-oriented design. The benefit here was that it made the code much easier to modify and extend, saving the programmers a great amount of development time.

2. We made the game database driven. Thanks to the object-oriented design, almost nothing about any object in AoE is hard-coded into the program. Instead, huge tables of information describe every characteristic of every object that appears in the game. The designers used a system of over forty Paradox tables to control and shape the game. As a result, they were able to constantly update and tweak the game, and then test their changes without having to involve a programmer.

3. We stayed in close contact and working together with the publisher. I can’t say enough good things about how the close contact with our publisher, Microsoft, helped the development of AoE. By keeping them "in the loop" on our progress, they worked with us instead of against us as things happened.

The best example of how this relationship aided development is the way we handled schedule slippage. Each time something took longer than expected or new problems cropped up, we effectively communicated the delay to Microsoft.

With a clear understanding of what was happening and why, they reaffirmed their commitment to assist us in producing a quality game, whatever amount of time that would take. So instead of being panic-stricken and whacked out, we remained professional and focused on our goals.

4. We played our own game. While this may sound simple, it’s very important. Throughout the development process, every person in the company not only play tested, but played AoE with the purpose of having fun.

As a result, we were very in tune with why the game was fun, and what people were likely to get out of it. We had 20 guys who were determined not to let the game play be compromised or watered down.

5. Performance was good. Performance truly means a lot if you want your game to have broad appeal. Age of Empires can adequately run an eight-player game in 16MB of RAM on a P120 system. Contrast that with Total Annihilation, which requires 32MB and at least a 200MHz CPU for an eight-player game. Achieving this level of performance required a group effort. The programmers expended extra energy on keeping memory consumption in check and identifying bottlenecks, while the artists culled extra animation frames and reorganized the graphics to maximize free memory.

6.The company respected its employees. I have to say something about the way Ensemble Studios treated its employees and their families. It is well known that software development, especially game development, involves great sacrifices of time and can be hell on personal relationships.

Ensemble’s thoughtful management respected that by going out of their way to include families at numerous company dinners and other events, and to make them feel welcome to come by the offices at any time. Additionally, after crunching hard to meet a milestone, they would insist that employees take a couple of days off to catch up with their families. People were allowed flexible schedules if they needed them, and flowers or other tokens of appreciation were sent to the families periodically.

The result of this deliberate action by company management should be obvious; company morale and loyalty was higher than I have ever seen in fourteen years of software development. My wife loves my job as much as I do.

7. Localization really worked. From the beginning, we knew that Microsoft wanted to release AoE in six different languages, including Japanese. About halfway through development, we updated our code base to provide full localization support. This required stripping out and replacing all text references in the source code and maintaining all game text in an external resource file.

It also placed severe restrictions on how we could draw and display the text. We had to use the Windows GDI exclusively, something most games shun like the plague. It also meant that interface items such as buttons had to be sized to hold the largest possible translated form of their captions, limiting the clever things one could do with the design of the user interface.

But we buckled down and did it, following the guidelines exactly. And to our pleasant surprise, the conversion was swift and painless. We felt even better when the translators at Microsoft told us that localizing AoE was the smoothest and most pain-free project they had ever done.

The benefit to us was enormous in that we had a single executable program file that was the same for all translated versions of the game, thus avoiding the huge headache that comes with tracking bugs and releasing updates for multiple versions.

8. We worked as a team that respected all its members. A project of AoE’s size required that we all work together in close quarters for extended periods of time. One of our expressed criteria in hiring new people is that we must be able to respect each other.

This respect, complemented by the company’s actions towards its employees, fostered an excellent sense of family and team spirit among everyone. We avoided having different groups develop a sense of isolation from the project, and as a result, attitudes and spirits remained high even during the worst crunch time.

Had tempers flared and cliques developed, I honestly don’t believe that AoE could have made it out the door in 1997.

Things That Went Wrong Or We Could Have Done Better

1. We held the beta test too late in the development cycle. A public beta test of AoE was held in August 1997, but we didn’t come near to exploiting the full potential of it. We were too close to the end of the project to make any game play changes, despite the wealth of useful feedback we received. Manuals were already set to be printed, and most of the design had been set in stone. All we could really do was fix any bugs that were found. For any future projects, we vowed to hold the beta testing earlier.

2. There was inadequate communication with the QA people at Microsoft. For most of the project, bug reporting was handled through a database and developers didn’t directly communicate with the testers. As a result many bugs wound up taking much longer to resolve, and new features went untested.

An intermediate database was simply not enough to let testers and developers know what the other was really thinking. In future projects, we would like to assign a specific tester to each programmer and have them communicate by phone every couple of days.

Near the end of development, this did happen for a couple people, and for them productivity with testing and bug resolution was drastically improved.

3. We sometimes failed to coordinate development through the leads. Yet another area where personnel communication could have improved the development was among our own teams. Each team Programming, Art, Game Design, and Sound has a lead person who is responsible for keeping track of what each member of his or her team is doing. The lead is the go-to person when someone outside has new requests for the team.

As the development of AoE progressed and the pressures rose, adherence to this system broke down as people went direct to get their needs filled quickly. We paid a price for it. People didn’t know about programming changes or new art that was added to the game, and the level of confusion rose, creating a time drain and distraction. We all had to stop at times just to figure out what was going on.

4. We failed to adequately test multi-player games with modem connections. One problem with our development environment is that it isn’t comparable to the typical end user system. During the course of development, the multiplayer portions of AoE were tested extensively.

When we played a game in the office, our fast machines, stuffed full of RAM, communicated with each other on our high-speed LAN. When we tested Internet play, our communications were handled through the company’s T1 line. One thing that we failed to realize in our testing was the fact that most players would be using dial-up modem connections to commercial Internet service providers.

And it wasn’t just us; the same situation applied to the testing labs at Microsoft. As a result, modem connection games were under-tested. Bugs that were harmless when ping times were low resulted in dropped games for users on slower Internet connections. And our high-speed network masked the fact that under certain not-so-uncommon circumstances, AoE could require 15K of network bandwidth per second -- six times what even a 56K modem can provide on the uplink side.

As a result, we were taken a bit by surprise when reports of multiplayer game problems rolled in. Though our first patch fixed this problem, the situation was unacceptable. Now, each developer has a modem and several different ISPs are used, as modem testing is a big part of our testing process.

5. Portions of development relied on products that were not delivered on time. There was a second reason that modem games were under-tested; problems with the delivery and quality of DirectPlay from Microsoft. Features that were promised, and even included in beta releases, weren’t present when the delayed final release was delivered.

Direct X 5a wasn’t available to us until a month before the game shipped. In the meantime, our communications programmer was burning the midnight oil writing the functionality that was expected but not delivered. Waiting on promised drivers and SDKs is one of the harder things that developers have to deal with; even those with Microsoft as a publisher have no control over them.

6. We did not plan for a patch. The version 1.0a patch, even though it was a success, was problematic in that as a company we had not planned for it. The general argument is that if you know you are going to need to release a patch, then you shouldn’t be shipping the game in the first place.

While one can take that stand, it’s also a fact that no game developer’s testing can match that of the first 50,000 people who buy and play the game. Your customers will do and try things that you never dreamed of, while running on hardware and drivers that you never heard of. Looking around, nearly every significant game released this year has had a patch or update released for it.

Rather than deny this reality, we would like to allocate resources and expectations in the future so that we can release any necessary updates days or weeks after our games ship, rather than months.

7. We didn’t manage “surprise” events as well as we could have. During the development period, we experienced several sudden events that caused us, as a company, to stop what we were doing. These events included the creation of a demo version of the game and materials for press coverage of AoE.

While most of the events were beneficial to the company, we weren’t very good at handling them, and they threw off our schedules. These disruptions mostly came late in development, when their impact was felt the most. One of our goals for future games is to minimize the impact of unplanned events by giving advance notice when possible and restricting them by minimizing the number of people that have to respond to them.

8. We didn’t take enough advantage of automated testing. In the final weeks of development, we set up the game to automatically play up to eight computers against each other. Additionally, a second computer containing the development platform and debugger could monitor each computer that took part. These games, while randomly generated, were logged so that if anything happened, we could reproduce the exact game over and over until we isolated the problem.

The games themselves were allowed to run at an accelerated speed and were left running overnight. This was a great success and helped us in isolating very hard to reproduce problems. Our failure was in not doing this earlier in development; it could have saved us a great deal of time and effort. All of our future production plans now include automated testing from Day One.

The Age of Empires development team. Matt Pritchard is front row, second from right.

Patching It All Up

Once AoE was shipped off to production, we threw ourselves a big party to let off some stress. It turns out we were a bit premature in our revelry. Shortly after AoE arrived on store shelves we began receiving feedback on problems with the path finding, unit AI behaviors, population limits, and multiplayer play.

Additionally, some bugs were found that a player could exploit to gain an unfair advantage in the game. Management was stirred to action at both Ensemble and Microsoft, and the decision to do a patch for AoE was made.

Although time was taken away from other projects, and it took longer than desired, the patch was a success; it vastly improved the quality of multiplayer games, fixed the bugs, and addressed the game play concerns that had been raised. And that brings the development of AoE to where it is today, which I hope is somewhere on your hard drive...

[Matt Pritchard designed the graphics engine for Age of Empires. He also worked on Age of Empires II, Age of Mythology, and BlackSite: Area 51. This article was originally published in the March 1998 issue of Game Developer magazine.]

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The coming of a fully automated society has led some Silicon Valley execs to extreme measures

Image: tristan quinn / bbc

Until a couple of years ago, Antonio Garcia Martinez was living the dream life: a tech-start up guy in Silicon Valley, surrounded by hip young millionaires and open plan offices.

SEE ALSO: This is for you, Elon Musk: 5 threats to humanity greater than artificial intelligence

“Ive seen whats coming,” he told me when I visited him recently for BBC Twos Secrets of Silicon Valley. “And its a big self-driving truck thats about to run over this economy.”

“Every time I meet someone from outside Silicon Valley a normy I can think of 10 companies that are working madly to put that person out of a job.”

Antonio estimates that within 30 years, half of us will be jobless. “Things could get ugly,” he told me. Its very scary, I think we could have some very dark days ahead of us.”

Former Facebook executive Antonio Garcia Martinez at his remote island hideout, ready in case automation causes social breakdown

Image: tristan quinn / bbc

“Ive seen whats coming, and its a big self-driving truck thats about to run over this economy.”

Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, 27 year old founder of Starsky Robotics who are using $5 million of investment to develop self driving trucks.

Image: tristan quinn / bbc

Bob: i can i i everything else.

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

Around half of all Silicon Valley billionaires have some degree of apocalypse insurance.

Jamie Bartlett outside Apples new $5 billion HQ

Image: Tristan quinn / bbc

Antonio told me in the race between technology and politics the technologists are winning. They will destroy jobs and economies before we even react to them.

Before I can answer, he tells precisely me what I have: “You have hope, thats what you have. Hope. And hope is a shitty hedge.”

WATCH: This beautiful 32,000-square-foot mural was just unveiled in Rio