Robots Need Love Too is an iOs puzzle game about two lovestruck robots from Elephant Mouse.
In the beginning of Robots Need Love Too, you can choose names, gender, and preferred pronoun for your romantic robots. In addition to the obvious he and she choices, your robots could use the genderqueer pronouns they, zie, ey, or xie, and naturally any two robots can fall in love. Robot gender and pronouns are entirely cosmetic features for this puzzle game, but character customization is always about allowing players to recognize ourselves in the game and connect more with our protagonist. The ability to select preferred pronoun and the gender creates an inclusive space for all gamers and a refreshing spin on the ol’ rescue-the-princess narrative as well.
It’s amazing how inclusive just a few text options can be. Oh, and the UI doesn’t start on any particular gender, either, which helps question heteronormative defaults.
I chose Pyramus and Thisbe, because I’ve received a classical education. (And when connecting with characters, I like doomed relationships and literary references. What?) I was not disappointed in any of the resulting text narrative.
One every level, the lovestruck robots need to reach each other. Players arrange arrows to bring the ‘bots to their goal, collecting up to 3 hearts along the way. As the game progresses, there are obstacles, gaping holes in the floor, immobile arrows, magnets to drag robots across the room, and other challenges to the robots’ union. The course of true love never did run smooth.
Robots can only go where they’re programmed, so I wondered if my robots would walk an endless loop or if they’d step off into a hole. They would! And my ridiculous experimentation was rewarded with achievements! It’s like the Elephant Mouse team was rewarding my bad choices!
Each puzzle level is made up of two parts, Pyramus’ path and Thisbe’s path, and sometimes one side was much more difficult than the other. It also took me a couple levels to really figure out how to work the magnets. A couple rough patches didn’t turn me off the game, because the game is just so cute, and because each level had a sweet little flavortext about the robots’ relationship.
Elephant Mouse’s previous games include Star Trek: Rivals and Lil’ Birds (as Villain Games). Also, I’ve socialized with more than one employee of Elephant Mouse, and I worked with some of the RNLT team on Star Trek: Rivals. None of them have offered me sexual favors, illicit drugs, piles of cash, or whatever massive bribes games bloggers are supposedly receiving, which I think was a gross oversight on their part, don’t you?
Robots Need Love Too is available free on the App Store.
The Tick-Tick Diner on Route 46 used to have a dish called Greek fries, which involved diner fries, feta, thin strips of gyro, and tzatziki sauce, but they’ve changed up staff and menu, and it’s gone. By the way, a lot of things changed at the Tick-Tick, because one of the owners hired a hitman to kill the other owner! This is a real thing that happened for real, and not a forced lead in to New Jersey mafia joke. When the story got out — and it got out because when you are hiring a murderer, it’s probably best not to hire an undercover cop — my Facebook feed was on fire with Montclair friends posting the link and their amazement that this could be connected to our favorite place for all-day pancakes, bottomless coffee and exam cramming, disco fries at the round tables and so many other memories.
Laojia, 老家, is the Chinese word for hometown, the characters are Old and Family, and as every single person I knew from my hometown shared their shock, and all of our friends and significant others made the expected Tony Soprano comments, I finally understood it.
Attempted murder aside, those were pretty great fries.
Gussy’s Greek Devil food truck came near our studio today. (I’ve just noticed a new blog trend: I eat food and then end up writing about other places that food reminds me of.) Food was ready really fast, standard chicken pita was very nice, but what stood out were the Greek fries.
Skinny, hot, not-greasy fries, tossed in salt and oregano, with feta on top. This is a huge portion of delicious food, and you should probably not try to eat a pita or a gyro with it. I’m just saying.
Female employees working at Apple will soon be offered a fertility benefit of up to $20,000 to put toward freezing their eggs, which advocates say gives women the freedom to seek career advancement without worrying about future family plans.
via Apple to pay female employees up to $20,000 for new egg freezing fertility benefit.
I almost wish I were tech blogging right now, just so I could title my coverage of this story ab ovo usque ad mala.
Nescafe and Hello Kitty next to my computer.
I wrote a new script a few weeks ago, to teach our students about Ada Lovelace Day. Here’s what I decided not to include.
Today is Ada Lovelace day, which is not her birthday or any date significant to her life. An unassuming date in the middle of October was chosen because it was a considerate date without major conflicts, because when we are honoring women who’ve been ignored in tech for decades, let’s be considerate and thoughtful and choose a date that’s convenient for others, ok? Ugh. Maybe I should include that, it’s a pretty good metaphor for women’s experiences in STEM fields!
Ada Lovelace is the daughter of Lord Byron, the writer who was known for — never mind, kids, you’re too young. Let’s just call him a famous writer!
The Analytical Engine, designed by Charles Babbage, was the forerunner to the Difference Engine, and WHAT? What is this? Turns out Charles Babbage never actually built the Difference Engine, although he managed to receive over 17,000 pounds from the British government to do so. Huh. Kinda the patron saint of those project-delay emails from funded Kickstarters, now that I think about it. Also, pretty cool metaphor for certain parts of startup culture.
This is getting really long. Our students are aspiring developers, so I’ll focus on the invention of the computer and the creation of computer programming. That means deleting the last three paragraphs on how Ada Lovelace was one of the earliest tech bloggers, by looking at emerging technology, envisioning all the potential uses, and then writing her thoughts and publishing to share with her mathematician friends.
My scripts are always read and performed by a man, which is usually more than with me (I hate listening to my recorded voice and I have extremely conflicted feelings on becoming more visible) but it feels weird to be invisible on this particular topic.
Ada Lovelace died at 36. She invented programming in that time, and I’m basically the same age, and I’ve… um… I wrote some things that weren’t completely dreadful. Sometimes.
My actual post for our students went on a company blog, and the related Ada Lovelace Day video has been very well-received by our audience of 8-year-olds.
Basically every day, I wear jeans with a plaid flannel shirt buttoned over a t-shirt from a game or app promo. I mean, I usually wears earrings and eye makeup and nail polish, too, but it’s the same outfit.
That’s what I wear to work every day, which is fine because this is also what all the men in my studio wear to work every day. Well, maybe not the cosmetics.
When I lost weight a few years ago, I looked forward to choosing and wearing cute things every day, instead of selecting from my least-unflattering outfits. (Whenever I write about this, someone always comments to tell me that people can be healthy and happy at any size, and I definitely don’t mean to imply that one must be a certain size in order to wear nice things. But for me, being terribly depressed for about a year directly correlated to being overweight for about a year. Not my favorite year, all things considered.) Now, I have an embarrassing amount of clothes that I never seem to wear, and I’ve decided to branch out from jeans-and-flannel every day. There are so many other things to wear! So many clothes to choose from!
So… should I wear my grey miniskirt and black sweater, or my black miniskirt and grey sweater tomorrow?
This entire post from Kathy Sierra is an honest and thoughtful look at the internet attacks on women in tech and games. The whole thing is worth reading, discussing the backlash women face when we do things like make videogames, have opinions on games, or basically exist in the public space.
There is only one reliably useful weapon for the trolls to stop the danger you pose and/or to get max lulz: discredit you. The disinformation follows a pattern so predictable today it’s almost dull: first, you obviously “f*cked” your way into whatever role enabled your undeserved visibility. I mean..duh. A woman. In tech. Not that there aren’t a few deserving women and why can’t you be more like THEM but no, you are NOT one of them.
You are, they claim, CLEARLY “a whore”. But not the sex-worker kind, no, you are the Bad Kind of Whore. Actually TWO kinds: an Attention/Fame Whore and an Actual Have Sex In Exchange For Jobs, Good Reviews, Book Deals Whore. I mean, could there be ANY other explanation for your visibility? But the sex-not-merit meme is just their warm-up, the lowest-hanging-fruit in a discredit/disinfo campaign.
Because what the haters MOST want the world to know is this: what you’re serving your audience? It’s NOT EVEN ACTUAL KOOLAID. “Snake oil”, the trolls insist. You’re a “proven liar”. Or, as I was referred to yet again just yesterday by my favorite troll/hater/harasser: “a charlatan”. And there is “evidence”. There is always “evidence”. (there isn’t, of course, but let’s not let that get in the way.)
And then:
A particularly robust troll-crafted hot button meme today is that some women are out to destroy video games (shoutout to #gamergaters). Another is that they are taking jobs from men. Men who are, I mean obviously, more deserving. “If women/minorities/any oppressed group are given special treatment, that’s not equality,” they argue “I guess you don’t believe in equality, feminists.” Quickly followed by, “wait, did I say ‘oppressed group’? There’s no such thing as an oppressed group I just meant Professional Victims Who Pretend To Be Oppressed And Serve Social Justice Warrior Koolaid.”
Life for women in tech, today, is often better the less visible they are.
I spent a bit of time this summer explaining to my App Design students that when you call your game Broccoli Avenger or Astro Kitty, those words are now a title, and therefore a proper noun, and need to be capitalized. Useful life skills, my friends.
One of the many things I miss about Beijing is having delicious dumplings all the time. There’s a pretty heated debate about which dough it the best, and which filling, and whether the best dumplings are steamed or fried or boiled, but I don’t care, all dumplings are tasty!
One of the many, many things I miss about New York is the Rickshaw dumpling truck. Delicious dumplings, without the possibility that I misspoke and ordered something wrong, like that time I accidentally ordered a whole chicken. (Chinese is hard, ok?)
North Carolina is not the greatest place for dumplings, unless you mean the floury kind with chicken, so whenever I cross paths with the Chirba Chirba truck, even if I’m not particularly hungry, I stop and get dumplings.
Smiling baozi!
Chirba Chirba parks near my office sometimes, which is about as good as it gets in North Carolina. They have a rotating selection of dumplings, including a Beijing-duck kind and a pork and chives kind. There’s always at least one vegetarian option, which is more likely to be a tasty mushroom dumpling than a token salad.
Delicious jiaozi!
Chirba has other things, like edamame and tea eggs, which I guess you could have if you didn’t want dumplings. But are you sure you don’t want dumplings?
