https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinkin%27_Things

>Thinkin' Things is a series of educational video games by the Edmark Corporation and released for Windows and Mac in the 1990s. Entries in the series include Thinkin' Things Collection 1 (Formerly Thinkin Things) (1993), Thinkin' Things Collection 2 (1994), Thinkin' Things Collection 3 (1995), the adventure game Thinkin' Things: Sky Island Mysteries (1998), Thinkin’ Things Galactic Brain Benders (1999), Thinkin' Things: All Around Frippletown (1999) and Thinkin' Things: Toony the Loon's Lagoon (1999).

>The Thinkin' Things series allows players to experiment and explore with interactive objects in different ways and methods throughout the games. This can be in the form of playing with shapes, patterns, motions, sound effects and music tunes. Every game has its own preset designs and demonstrations to give the player an idea of how the game works before the player can customize a design of their own. Some games also permit the player to record their own sounds with a microphone.

History of KidPix is interesting too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix

Thinkin' Things Collection 1 Gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rszh-Pq-mpw

Especially the mesmerizing bouncing balls:

https://youtu.be/Rszh-Pq-mpw?t=629

Thinkin' Things Collection 2 Gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Sh5pxLSlA

Thinkin' Things Collection 3 Gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCFNUc10Vu8

Alan Kay also loves Thinkin' Things (as well as Warren Robinett's "Rocky's Boots" and "Robot Odyssey", the same guy who made Atari Adventure), and cited one of its levels, a football halftime parade programming system, as a precursor to blocks-based visual programming:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423040

DonHopkins on June 29, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available on...

From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:55:27 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins, Chris Trottier, John Gilmore

Hi SJ --

Robot Odyssey is another game that would benefit from having a clean separation between the graphical/physical modeling simulation and the behavioral parts (both the games levels and the robot programming could be independently separated out) -- this would make a great target for those who would like to try their hand at game play and at robot behavioral programming systems.

This is a long undropped shoe for me. When I was the CS at Atari in 82-84, it was one of our goals to make a number of the very best games into frameworks for end-user (especially children's) creativity. Alas, Atari had quite a down turn towards the end of 83 ... We did get "the Aquarium" idea from Ann Marion to morph into the Vivarium project at Apple ... And some of the results there helped with the later Etoys design.

Cheers,

Alan

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From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:57:51 -0600 (CST) Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins, Chris Trottier, John Gilmore

Thanks SJ --

We are benefiting here from Don Hopkins' generosity (and of the original designers and owners of these games).

The basic notion is that there are many games that, if modularized with nice separable interfaces, would be great environments for exploring various kinds of "learning by doing". For example, there is a nice separation between the "rules/dynamics" of a games world and the "strategies/actions" of the characters. There could be a third separation to break out the graphics and sound routines as a media environment.

For example, in SimCity, the first and most useful breakout for children would be to allow various UIs to be made that would let children find out about and try experiments with the "city dynamics rules". It's not clear what the best forms for this would be, so it would be great to have a variety of different designers supply modules that would try to bridge the gaps to the child users.

This could work even for pretty young children (we helped the Open Magnet School set up Doreen Nelson's "City Building" curriculum in the third grade of the school and this was very successful -- a child controlled SimCity would have been wonderful to have).

Maybe this separation could be set up via the D-bus so that separate processes written in any language the authors choose could be used. This would open this game up to different experiments by different researchers to explore different kinds of UIs and strategy languages for various ages of children. I think this would be really cool! We would all learn a lot from this and the children would benefit greatly.

A trickier deal would be the world dynamics (I'm just guessing here, but Don would know). This is one of the really great things about SimCity -- it can really accommodate lots of different changes and stitch things together to make a pretty decent simulation without too many seams showing. (Given the machines this game originally ran on, many of the heuristics are likely to be a little patchy. Don has indicated as much.) I think doing a great world dynamics engine for games like SimCity would be really wonderful -- and could even be a thesis project or two.

Don has talked about doing the separations so that many new games can be made in addition to the variations.

Similarly, Robot Odyssey (one of the best games concepts ever) was marred by choosing a way to program the robots where the complexity of programming grew much faster than the functionality that could be given to the robots. This game was way ahead of its time.

Again, the idea would be do make a game in which environment, levels of challenge, and how the robots are programmed would be broken out into separate processes that a variety of gamers and researchers could do experiments in language and UI.

One of the most wonderful possibilities about this venture is that it will bring together very fluent designers from many worlds of computing (more worlds than usually combine to make a game) in the service of the children. We should really try to pull this off!

Cheers,

Alan

pjungwir on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | next [–]

Does anyone here remember ZZT? I loved building puzzles in that game with the scripting language. You didn't program to play, but you could make your own games and program the behavior of special objects. It's the closest realized example I can think of to what Alan described here.

jasonjayr on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | next [–]

I remember ZZT -- and the excitement when I found an archive of alternate worlds I could download from a BBS. Learning to program ZZT worlds was one of the first steps I took to programming.

DonHopkins on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | prev | next [–]

I'm not familiar with ZZT, but here's a reference to another game that inspired Alan Kay, called "Thinkin' Things", in a discussion about the Snap! visual programming language!

https://snap.berkeley.edu

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From: Alan Kay Date: Thu, 3 May 2018 07:49:16 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)

Yes, all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one I designed for Etoys* more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk.

I'd advise coming up with a special kid's oriented language for your SimCity/Metropolis system and then render it in "blocks".

Cheers

Alan

------------- * Two precursors for DnD programming were in my grad student's -- Mike Travers -- MIT thesis (not quite the same idea), and in the "Thinking Things" parade programming system (again, just individual symbol blocks rather than expressions).

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From: Don Hopkins Date: Fri, 4 May 2018 00:43:56 +0200 Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)

I love fondly remember and love Thinkin’ Things 1, but I never saw the subsequent versions!

But there’s a great demo on youtube!

https://youtu.be/gCFNUc10Vu8?t=24m58s

That would be a great way to program SimCity builder “agents” like the bulldozer and road layer, as well as agents like PacMan who know how to follow roads and eat traffic!

I am trying to get my head around Snap by playing around with it and watching Jens’s youtube videos, and it’s dawning on me that that it’s full blown undiluted Scheme with continuations and visual macros plus the best ideas of Squeak! The concept of putting a “ring” around blocks to make them a first class function, and being able to define your own custom blocks that take bodies of block code as parameters like real Lisp macros is brilliant! That is what I’ve been dreaming about and wondering how to do for so long! Looks like he nailed it! ;)

Here’s something I found that you wrote about tile programming six years ago.

-Don

Squeak-dev:

http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoy...

Etoys, Alice and tile programming ajbn at cin.ufpe.br () 6 years ago

Folks,

I have been trying the new version of Alice . It also uses tile programming like Etoys. Just for curiosity, does anyone know the history of Tile Programming? TIA,

Antonio Barros PhD Student Informatics Center Federal University of Pernambuco Brazil

Alan Kay 6 years ago

This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in the CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set). This project was basically about being able to march around a football field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a very simple tile based programming system. Also, a grad student from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents -- the system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs in Mike's very powerful system.

The etoys originated as a design I did to make a nice constructive environment for the internet -- the Disney Family.com site -- in which small projects could make by parents and kids working together. SqC made the etoys ideas work, and Kim Rose and teacher BJ Conn decided to see how they would work in a classroom. I thought the etoys lacked too many features to be really good in a classroom, but I was wrong. The small number of features and the ease of use turned out to be real virtues.

We've been friends with Randy Pausch for a long time and have had a number of outstanding interns from his group at CMU over the years. For example, Jeff Pierce (now a prof at GaTech) did SqueakAlice working with Andreas Raab to tie it to Andreas' Balloon3D. Randy's group got interested in the etoys tile scripting and did a very nice variant (it's rather different from etoys, and maybe better).

Cheers,

Alan

Mike Travers Portfolio:

AGAR Ant World:

https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/ant-world-illo.gif

Ant Agent Graph:

https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/agent-graph-illo.gif

Brainworks:

https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/brainworks.jpg

Agar: An Animal Construction Kid (Mike Travers' thesis, supervised by Marvin Minsky):

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/78088

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/78088/2008424...

https://MicropolisWeb.com

It also has a cellular automata machine simulator ("Space Inventory") that you can toggle by pressing the space bar. Thanks to HN user lioeters's PR, we've also just added 8 alternative tile sets that you can switch between with the - and = keys! Once I've hooked up the city drawing tools, they will also let you draw into the live or paused cellular automata tiles, and even unleash disasters like tornadoes and monsters and earthquakes on the abstract tile patterns, that draw into the tiles themselves, so you can play with the tile map like KidPix!

More discussion of Micropolis development plans:

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/pull/3

An example of what I mean about KidPix drawing with SimCity tiles (without the drawing tools hooked up yet, really just a cellular celebration of the newly added tile sets):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI

Integrating Snap! with Micropolis enables procedural circuit bending:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending

>Circuit bending is the creative, chance-based customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low-voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators.

>Emphasizing spontaneity and randomness, the techniques of circuit bending have been commonly associated with noise music, though many more conventional contemporary musicians and musical groups have been known to experiment with "bent" instruments. Circuit bending usually involves dismantling the machine and adding components such as switches and potentiometers that alter the circuit.

Will mentions Braitenberg machines in his 1996 talk, "Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26", in response to questions a student asked about modeling interpersonal interaction and I asked about storytelling:

https://youtu.be/nsxoZXaYJSk?t=4466

Student:

What about from person to person, you talking about the information that's contained within the objects, so there can be information in another person, that you want to interact with in the environment.

Have you looked at any reasons why you would want to do that?

Will Wright:

Oh yeah, I mean, that's that's the hard problem.

I mean, simulating ants is hard enough, when you get to people there's really no hope.

There are two issues here.

You can look at this as a technology.

It's not a product right now.

And their are a few directions this could go.

I could see this becoming, let's say, a multiplayer network MUD kind of a thing.

You might have a thousand people playing SimCity from the bottom up, each person building their own house in a big multi-user space.

In which case that issue is a little less important, because most of the people are real people, and you're dealing with puppets.

As a standalone game, which is probably our our closer target, we have to deal with the problem you're bringing up, which is how do we deal with people to people?

And it's hard, I mean there's just -- I'm sure Terry can elaborate on that more than I can.

But the best thing we can do is prop up a convincing illusion.

We don't have to be doing a valid simulation of human personality.

What we have to do is we have to put up something that's ambiguous enough to where somebody can read in what they want.

Actually in this thing what I have right now are people come up and they converse, but you don't hear what they're saying, they just gesture, and sometimes they look mad, sometimes they kind of look contemplative.

It's kind of interesting how much people will read into that.

This is kind of dynamic that we've seen again and again where something happens in SimCity and they said "oh I was running my nuclear reactor near the red line, and then there was so much smoke coming out of it, this plane crashed, and because of that, this and that happened", and they'll describe this long causal chain of events that I know does not exist.

I designed the simulation, I know that there's no linkage between the power output of the power plant, the planes crashing, but they're convinced it exists.

Don Hopkins:

They're using it as a medium to tell stories about.

Will Wright:

Yeah!

Don Hopkins:

Where they're using it as a piece of paper, to write.

Will Wright:

Yeah, that's exactly right.

There's a parallel simulation going on here in the game.

Everybody's taking a linear path through this, and they're basically, most people will attempt to understand things like this with a story.

They'll think about "I did this, then that happened, because of that", and so the story becomes kind of their logical connection, their logical reverse engineering, of the simulation that they're playing inside of.

Now on the people's side, I think we can do a lot in this as a product, by propping up that illusion of people.

Again, if this is a doll house, we don't want the dolls to be sentient things.

We want the dolls to be interesting enough to where I can play games with them.

There was actually a really interesting doll that this company came out with.

Oh, it was Worlds of Wonder, this really cool doll, I've got a couple of them after they went out of business.

It's called the Julie doll.

But it was like this $250 doll with voice recognition, and it said all these things.

It had just a huge amount of ROM with digitized speech in it, and so it would sit there and try and have stupid conversations with you.

And really it was kind of Eliza, or had keywords it would recognize, and give you these kind of non-committal responses.

But in the testing of that, well first of all it was a $300 doll.

Who's going to buy the kid a $300 doll?

So it was really more, it was actually the only doll I've ever seen that appealed to grown men.

Grown men love this, I mean this is a hacker's doll.

But I talked to the guy who was working this project, and he said they put this in focus groups with girls.

And they played with it for a while, and then after about a half an hour they take the batteries out, and keep playing with it.

And what was happening is that the girls were propping up this elaborate fantasy in their play, and the dolls were supposed to be a structure for that fantasy, they weren't supposed to be the fantasy.

The doll was telling them what the fantasy was, and it was conflicting with what the girls were saying, and so it was interfering actively with their fantasy and their play.

So in that regard, I think we can actually kind of take that path with these people.

And all we have to do is deal with them at a very local kind of a state machine, Braitenberg Machine kind of level, and say that they're angry, and they're hungry, and they're sleepy.

And then we can actually do some things where maybe they have a little, what you might call, structural ambiguity about what they're actually saying.

One of the thoughts I had about this project in particular is that you'd see the people go up and they talk, and there would be some kind of a flavor to their conversation, but it would be more like Peanuts.

When they did the TV show of Peanuts, you'd hear the adults talking, and the adults would always be like "mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa", or soft, or loud.

You can tell if they're mad, or angry, or what, but you wouldn't hear what they were saying.

You'd have to read that into it.

I think this is the area where we sidestep the issue, just because as a commercial company we have to ship a game, we're not doing a research project.

So that's a long winded answer, sorry.