I’m already overwhelmed at my first GDC, and from what I’ve heard, things don’t even really get moving until tomorrow! The first two days are dominated by a number of excellent summits and tutorials, but apparently, the real action doesn’t start until tomorrow when the game competitions, expo floor, major announcements, and big keynotes all begin in the morning.

I’m very interested in the parallels between gaming and web, and how the lines have blurred between game-like social software and social games. With that in mind, several people told me Worlds in Motion summit would be most relevant to my interests with sessions that “delve into online worlds, social gaming and media and player created activity, providing insight for developers of all backgrounds into how the game industry is collectively building socialization into games and integrating personalization and player-generated content into gameplay.”

Instead, I’ve found the most inspiring and innovative talks have been in the Independent Games Summit. Unlike the companies in World in Motion, these tiny two-person startups and student projects are operating on a shoestring budget and exploring territory that the big guys aren’t.

It seems like most of the interesting new projects are happening on the web or as PC/Mac downloads, partly because they don’t have the funding or support to acquire dev kits for the consoles and partly because it gives them more control over their own fate. (For example, Xbox Live Arcade costs a minimum of $125,000 to create a game. The overhead for a Flash game, like starting a website, is mostly your own time.)

And because they have so many resource constraints, they’re developing gameplay that’s often experimental and completely unique. The IGF finalists are a laundry list of intriguing gameplay ideas (many of which I’ve mentioned on Waxy before):

• Audiosurf, a rhythm/racing/puzzle game that analyzes and visualizes your MP3 collection to create a dynamic 3D racetrack with characteristics pulled from tone, tempo, and volume.
• The Path, a horror game based on Little Red Riding Hood, with ambient music by Jarboe. If you follow the path before you, you lose the game.
• World of Goo, a construction game using physics to lift blobs to great heights
• Crayon Physics Deluxe, an adorable game that instantiates anything you sketch to solve puzzles.
• Poesysteme, breeding words with Darwinian evolution.
• Goo, like Go with liquid dynamics.
• Fret Nice, a platformer that uses the Guitar Hero guitar to control the character in time to the music
• Fez, the 2D character stuck in a 3D world

Several speakers have discussed how the art and design are more important than the technology, that games are more about conjuring emotion than showing off graphical effects. Aquaria co-creator Alec Holowka described game development as a Zelda Triforce, with three parts of Art/Design, Business/Marketing, and Technology. Some games, like movie-licensed games, are led by business but have poor technology and design. Others, like many big-budget games, are led by technology. Indie games need to support their work with honest marketing and solid technology, but it’s the creator’s voice, vision, and passion that ultimately make the game resonate with an audience.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to playing and meeting this year’s finalists tomorrow when the IGF Pavilion opens tomorrow.

Some notable quotes from the first couple of days of the show:

Gabe Zichermann on Facebook and eBay as MMOs: “I think we need to acknowledge there are things in life that are fun that game designers didn’t make… People are engaged in playing all the time — they’re not fake worlds a game designer made… Everybody plays games all the time, whether we as game designers make them or not.”

Raph Koster on virtual worlds: “We’re building theme parks instead of parks.”

Tracy Fullerton from USC Game Innovation Lab: “Indie’s not about finding a backdoor into the industry or building games on a shoestring budget. It’s about tearing down walls to create a new culture.”

This week, thanks to Simon Carless at GameSetWatch, I’m going to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco this week. I’ll be writing about the conference daily and guest-publishing over at GSW.

If you’re going, let me know. I’ll be updating my current location on Twitter intermittently if you want to get together.

Also, if anyone out there works at Valve or can otherwise get me into the Valve party on Wednesday night, get in touch! You’ll be my new best friend. Thank you, kind anonymous insider. I owe you cake.

It didn’t take long for online sleuths to identify the man behind the shootings at Northern Illinois University yesterday. Early this morning, before the police or the Associated Press released his name, online sleuths identified the 27-year-old man as Stephen P. Kazmierczak. Online, he went by “Steve Kaz,” “Kazmier,” and “StatisticsGrad.”

Working from there, a few blogs went to work at discovering his online accounts and other trails he’s left online. Here’s what we know so far, and I’ll be updating this entry throughout the day as I find more.

Academic

As mentioned in several news articles, he was the vice-president of the school’s Academic Criminal Justice Association. Their executive officers page lists one of his email addresses, [email protected]. Searching for that email address shows some discussion list activity from 2004 related to his work, but nothing recent.

Here’s his biography for his Vice-President position. (Via Steve Huff from True Crime Weblog.)

Steve served as an undergrad teaching aid for Sociology 388 (corrections) and 488 (juvenile delinquency) in spring, 2004. He has strong interests in justice reform and, as an older sociology/criminal justice major, he brings experience and ideas to the group.

My name is Steve Kazmierczak, and I’m a 3rd year student here at NIU. During my sophomore year I served as an aid for the SOCI170 web-board and last semester, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be a team leader for SOCI488-Juvenile Delinquency. Since attending NIU, I’ve worked very hard as a student, and I know that I would be able to forth the same effort as an officer of the ACA. I feel that I’m committed to social justice, and if elected as treasurer I promise to serve the NIU chapter of the ACA to the

best of my ability.

The following information was retrieved from the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign’s student database before it was removed. (Found on Odd Culture.)

alias: skazmie2

name: Kazmierczak Steven Phillip

pretty_name: Steven Phillip Kazmierczak

email: [email protected]

sudent_department_name: School of Social Work

student_program_name: MSW:Social Work -UIUC

student_level_description: Graduate – Urbana-Champaign

student_major_name: Social Work

phone: (815) 508-2416

office_address: 1207 W. Oregon, M/C 140, Urbana, IL 61801

title: ACADEMIC HOURLY

department: School of Social Work

type: person phone student staff

The NIU staff is removing pages where he was mentioned, but you can see in the Google cache that he won the 2006 Dean’s Award and the Sociology Honors Society.

Here’s a very short video of Stephen in class, taken by a professor in January 2004.

Personal

True Crime Weblog also discovered that he had problems with Paypal in this PaypalSucks thread from March 2007. He wrote, “Somebody please help me out, as I am desperate. I need this money to survive, as I am a poor graduate student just trying to make it by, which is why I started using Ebay in the first place, (to supplement the income I made through an assistantship).”

Testimonials

On a few sites, anonymous commenters that reportedly knew Kazmierczak have stepped forward to tell their stories. These are mostly anonymous, so it’s impossible to verify their accuracy.

From Odd Culture, posted today:

I knew this kid, friend of a friend type deal. He was odd, quiet always gave me a creepy vibe, but then a lot of people give me that so I didn’t think anything of it. Last I remember seeing him was in early jan. he showed me his tattoo’s. They were all graphic an gory, but thats what guys like as tattoos. One was the doll from the Saw movies. I found that a little weird, why would a guy this age have a tattoo of some terrifying doll that signified nothing but a crazy serial killer. It scared me. But whatever floats your boat I thought. Then they started talking about his guns, he didn’t bring it up, but just sat there and said a few things here and there jokingly, but quiet. I immediately thought why in the hell does this kid have a gun? He doesn’t look like a hunter and didn’t live anywhere I would consider dangerous enough for a gun, let alone two. The only thing I could think of is that he needed to prove something to himself or to someone else, since he was tall and gangly, and didn’t look like he was mr popular. It’s scary knowing that I hung out with that kid, that I sat there and discussed these things with him. He is one of those guys that you just know something is wrong with him the first time you meet him, but he’s nice so you figure he is just a little odd. As for a motive goes, I do know that he had some issues with his sexuality, maybe it has something to do with that.

Also posted today on Odd Culture, by someone named “William”:

I can’t believe some of you, I grew up with Steve. I don’t know what happened after we graduated high school to put him down this path but the kid I grew up with was a decent kid. I sat and ate lunch with him from grade school on up, we were in the same classes.

No matter how terrible his last acts I can’t reconcile this with the adult I knew graduating high school, and the kid I grew up with.

In April 2006, Jim Schaffer posted a very long rant mentioning Kazmierczak on an Aphex Twin fan forum. Radar Online confirmed that Kazmierczak worked at the Elks Grove Pirates Cove children’s theme park in 1995, so this one’s definitely real.

steve motherfucking kazmierczak. yes thats exactly the problem here.

i was working at pirates cove in late 1995 and i was you know $4.50/hr child labor laws be damned and like i remember steve kazmierczak, the kind of kid who engaged in odd acts of fellatio with his dog, the kind of kid who’d go and masturbate in the bathroom while you were over at his house, the kind of person who injured kids on the train ride cuz he was mental and he shouldn’t be given domain over kids on little faux-traincars with an aluminum baseball bat… when steve fucking kazmierczak ran up to me in late 95 early 96 proudly boasting his brand new copy of “i care because you do” like he was finally in with the cool kids.

both me and my friend joe died a little bit that day.

This morning, an anonymous commenter on The Copycat Effect wrote:

I attended just about every position with Steve at NIU. My senior year he was my Teachers Assistant for a quantitative research methods course. I would have never expected Steve to become involved in such a massive tragedy. He was always very nice, helpful, and a scholar. It is really a shame that he went and did something like this.

Updates

February 16: Some excellent digging by the commenters at True Crime Weblog revealed Kazmierczak’s Photobucket account. Inside, there’s a Get Well Soon card sent to “Jessica.”

According to this Chicago Tribune article, “[Kazmierczak] moved to Champaign with his girlfriend, also a graduate of NIU’s sociology program. The couple had both been officers in the school’s student chapter of the American Corrections Association.” The only other female member of the Academic Criminal Justice Association is Jessica Baty, the group’s Secretary.

So, Jessica Baty is almost certainly Kazmierczak’s girlfriend. The commenters also found this Myspace page belonging to Jessica, with an unpublished photo of the couple together. (I cached it, just in case.) Her profile is private, but currently has this status message: “Jessica is missing SK.”

February 17: An anonymous commenter below discovered this weblog from someone who lived next door to Kazmierczak while he was growing up. This entry and this entry are both fascinating reading.

Looks like Digg found a copy of the Tetris valentine I’ve been hosting on my server since February 2006. The original was created by Mitch at the wonderful 4 Color Rebellion gaming blog, but when I tried to redirect the requests to their original entry, the traffic shut down their server in a few minutes.

So if you’re looking for the valentine, here it is. Click it to see a full-size, print-quality version on 4 Color Rebellion’s site, and see their other 2006 Geek Valentines.

And if you like those, don’t miss 4 Color Rebellion’s geek valentines for last year and this year! In 2007, they made adorable Phoenix Wright, Nintendo DS, Wii, and Metroid Prime valentines. This year, it’s a set of valentines for Dr. Mario, Mario Galaxy, and Wii.

In case you’re 14 years old, relatively new to the Internet, and/or coming from Digg, here are a bunch of other two-year-old links you might have missed: Halo Babies, Ze Frank’s On Valentine’s Day, A Very Star Wars Valentines, All Your Heart Candy Are Belong To Us, a set of vintage 1980s Valentines including Mario, Zelda, and TMNT, vector art of Ralph Wiggum’s valentines, more original Nintendo valentines, and nothing woos a lady like romantic Perl poetry. Want something more fresh? New this year are the Team Fortress 2 valentines, Ironic Sans’ Scientist Valentines, Jacks of Science’s Science Valentines, Diesel Sweeties’ E-Cards 2.0, a DIY pulsating LED heart card, interlocking Moebius strip hearts, and Woot’s superhero comic anti-valentines.

Reading Rex Sorgatz’s commemoration of Wired Magazine’s first issue for its 15th birthday, I was reminded of the very first mentions of Wired online. Not on the web, which was only just getting started with the release of Mosaic 0.5 the month before, but on the uber-hip Northern California BBS, The WELL.

I love deep-diving the WELL archives for research. It’s an amazing glimpse at the tech and media scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s, but especially for anyone interested in Wired. Many of Wired’s founding staff and contributors were active on the WELL, and executive editor Kevin Kelly was a WELL co-founder, so it was natural that the BBS hosted the official Wired forum.

Below, for the first time on the public web, I’ve reprinted some of Wired’s early history on the WELL, including the first call-for-feedback from May 1992 (9 months before the first issue), the first press release, and some of the more interesting responses.

Continue reading “WIRED and The WELL” →