Pong; and I have been a gamer since a very tender age. After finishing my studies with a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and having worked as a software engineer for a while, I moved to Singapore at the beginning of 2005 where I finally got involved in game development and related activities at a professional level. I also wrote two books, "On the Way to Fun: an emotion based approach to successful game design" and "The Golden Age of Video Games: the birth of a multi-billion dollar industry" published by AKPeters and CRC Press.

Q. What do you do for a day job?

I'm currently the Game Design Department Chair at the Singapore campus of the DigiPen Institute of Technology, where I teach subjects like Game History and Game Mechanics for the Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts in Game
Design. After all the teaching and department management work, I'm also collaborating with a Singapore based company named Kentaura as Chief Game Designer. If you think all this keeps me quite busy, well, you are definitely right!

Q. How were you introduced to computers?

I remember it quite well: it was an evening during summer 1981: I was 8 and, with my parents, we were invited for dinner by one of my father's colleagues who just got a TI99/4A from the US. He kindly showed us how it worked and played some demos, using also a plotter. I was so fascinated by it I stored those abstract images printed in grayscale tones on a small roll of paper for years.

Q. What was the first game you played?

It was a Home Pong clone, specifically a ColorMate De Luxe: an obscure console made by an even more obscure manufacturer (Boyang Electronics). It seems very few people remember it by today. I really wonder how we got it...

Q. What was your first Commodore machine and do you still own it?

It was a C64. Alas, it broke many years ago: needless to say, the day I tried to switch it on and nothing happened, was very, very sad. On the other hand, this unlucky event helped in convincing my parents to buy an Amiga 500! The Amiga was later sold during my sophomore year in university to buy a PC. Shame on me!!

Q. Do you still own any “retro” computers?

Yes but, surprisingly for a "Commodorian" like me, I currently don't own any Commodore machines (yet!) but one of its competitors: the Sinclair
ZX-Spectrum. Somehow I always found the Speccy to be a very "cute" machine (compared to the "awesomeness" of the C64) and I always wanted to experience Ultimate early masterpieces as they were meant to be.

Q. Would you like to “plug” some of the games you have worked on, and what your involvement with the game was?

The first games I ever developed were for the C64: very simple action/arcades and text adventures. Luckily, none of them survived up to this day so no one can see how bad they were! As I was saying earlier, I started doing things at
a professional level only once I relocated to Singapore to design and develop serious games within the gamLAB at the Nanyang Technological University.

One of those projects was the "Virtual Orchestra", a PC game that aimed at providing a simple orchestra conducting training while serving also as an introduction to music making for children. I was the lead designer and programmer. "Orfeo" was another small PC game I developed more recently based on my academic research on the analysis of emotions. Here we had to rescue Eurydice by playing Orfeo's lyre and expressing different basic emotions like happiness, anger, sadness and fear. The game was showcased at some important events in Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro and got plenty of very interesting and extremely varied feedback, ranging from "enchanting" all the way down to "complete crap"! Actually, I do understand why it raised such a wide spectrum of possible reactions: Orfeo shows very innovative game mechanics and concept but it's really just a proof of concept so if you expect a polished and challenging game, you are most likely going to be hugely disappointed.

Last, I'm currently working on a new and very ambitious SNG (Social Network Game) for Kentaura. This is still an unannounced title so I can't say much for now but stay tuned because I believe it has real potential!

Q. I am intrigued by the “virtual Orchestra” can you explain more about this
project to our readers?

This project was designed with the idea of providing a simple "orchestra training" and educational tool and was playable with a "gyromouse", a device that resembled a Wiimote (but note that the Wii was not officially released
yet when we did this). By mimicking real conducting gestures, players could control in real time the tempo, the articulation and the volume of the music performed by the orchestra on the virtual stage. The game was presented at the Serious Games Summit in Washington DC in 2006 and at various events and road shows, gaining very good feedback and the interest of the international press but, unfortunately, no one from the gaming industry seemed interested in
taking the project to the next level. I guess it was not considered commercially viable... Anyway I look forward to working on this concept again in the future, maybe once I will finally get my hands on a XBox/Kinect SDK!

Q. You say the book can be used as an educational tool as well as a general curious user tool; can you expand a little on its educational use?

Indeed, "the Golden Age of Video Games" was designed with the needs of a college level game history class in mind: light, concise, to the point and
with the most accurate data I could find. This doesn't mean it should be a
dull academic read full of numbers though, and it's my hope I managed to write it in an entertaining way for a general audience too: there are plenty of interesting anecdotes, including some exclusive ones on the very early days of the industry thanks to the input of Atari's co-founder Ted Dabney. While writing it, I tried to be as objective as possible but, I guess, you can still understand Commodore had a special place in my heart and memories...

Q. I know this is covered well in your book but “who invented the first video game”

Interestingly, this question is not as straightforward as we may think at
first and, indeed, it generated (and still generates!) lots of debates and controversy. It all depends on how we define "video games" in the first place: do we refer to games on dedicated hardware or also on general purpose computers? Should we only consider commercial products or also obscure lab/academic experiments? Only digital or also analogue? Do we take into account games that use TV technology in any way or only those that use a
proper TV signal? Only once we clarify all this (with the latter point being the most critical), we can try to answer the earlier question but, as long as there's no unanimous definition for the word/concept of "video games",there can't be any agreement on which was the first video game either. Personally, I tend to like general and simple definition of things, so my view is that any game that allows a player to interact with some images on a screen via TV related technology is a "video game". Under this assumption, the first example was the CRT Amusement Device developed by Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Man in 1947. It was an extremely simple and rudimentary experiment but it was

--- CrashWrite 2.0
* Origin: -:)--- Dragon's Lair BBS --(:- (39:901/281)