Table of Contents

• Game On in Berkeley

• Make Vol 92 Launch Party

• AI-generated Podcast for OxoCard

Game On in Berkeley

We took a field trip this week. Make: Books editor Kevin Toyama organized a visit to Game On in Berkeley, CA, which features “live, hands-on games.” It’s a twist on escape rooms and a lot more playful. Each game is in its own room and the gameplay is unguided. You use an RFID card to enter a room, push the door open and the lights inside come on. There are few instructions about what the game is or what to do. When the four of us stood in one of the rooms silently trying to figure things out, our host said: “Try talking to each other.” The other piece of advice was: “Expect to fail mulitple times.”

Make: Production Manager Craig Couden said: “I had a blast. We didn’t “win” a single game, but from the get-go, I had that itch to keep going and figure it out :P. There are a bunch of different rooms and there’s a mechanic where if you don’t figure out the puzzle in time or if you push a wrong button, you get booted out of the room, which at first I thought would be awful, but it turned out to be a great opportunity to talk it through with your team before trying again.

“All the games required the team to communicate and cooperate to figure it out, which was really interesting. But they’re also quick rounds, so 7 tries wouldn’t feel like it takes forever. Each puzzle can be modified for number of people and difficulty (or at least that’s the intention)

“The one we tried the most was a big marble maze in the center of one of the game rooms. We each had buttons that triggered actions (like diverting the metal balls) but we had to 1) figure out what our buttons did (which was not obvious), 2) figure out where we were trying to get the balls to go (which also was not obvious), and 3) frantically talk to each other because the timer was counting down and you couldn’t see everything going on at once.

We got a behind-the-scenes tour as well from two of the three members of the founding team, James Hopkin and Eric Mittler. Tim Alley, the other founder, had an educational play experience in the same location for eleven years.

Game on is created using maker technologies - 3D printers, laser cutters, electronics, Raspberry Pi’s. Eric and James both said that Make: Magazine had inspired them. James was influenced by a visit to Boda Borg in the Boston area, which features “real-world gaming.”

James does a lot of the construction and finish work to set up the physical room. Eric does most of the programming of the rooms, which use Raspberry Pis as controllers. He programs in NodeRed, an event-driven programming framework, and everything in Game On runs on Javascript. Sitting at his desk, Eric can monitor messages from each room - such as notifications from button pushes. He has statistics on how many people have played a game and whether they’ve succeeded or not — the rate is low. “We can make the game easier,” he said. “It’s all software that can be changed.” James and Eric showed us a room in development in which seahorses race around a four-lane track in the shape of a pentagon. The controls to move the seahorses are embedded in the floor of the room.

Kevin will be writing an article for a future issue of Make: with more of the details. If you are ever near Game On, it’s definitely a blast, as Craig said.

Make Vol 92 Launch Party

On Thursday, Make: Community Editor David Groom hosted the Make: launch party online for Volume 92, which is both our 20th Anniversary Issue and our Digital Fabrication issue. In case you missed the live session, here’s a link to the recording.

We also published online an interview I did with the original team that produced the first issues of Make: — Mark, David, Shawn, Paul and also Keith. Learn more about “the OG Team.”

AI-generated Podcast for OxoCard

One of the new AI tools out there is NotebookLM from Google.

Thomas Garaio of Oxon fed NotebookLM about bunch of articles on Make: OxoCard Innovation Kit and asked it to create a half-hour podcast. While it is a futuristic kind of thing, the podcast feels retro as if we’d returned to CNET Radio and a pair of male and female hosts were chatting about the latest technology.

Because I produce and edit the Make:Cast podcast myself, I know how much work it takes to do this, and there’s no work involved in using AI to create a podcast. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.

Speaking of Oxocard, here’s a fun demo of the synthesizer cartridge, which is available for $35 on MakerShed along with the $79 Oxocard Innovation Kit.

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