Sunday, June 10, 2007

Game Jam, Day 2

Woke up this morning to find the Jam in the Boston Globe. One thing I'm learning: I was a very slow-paced reporter. I like to get to know my interview subjects and ask them what they'd like to share, but being interviewed for this one was like WHAM! Call me asap. WHAM! Busy, call back. WHAM! Question question question thank you DONE. The other reporters took more time, but I'm still reeling from how fast they go. Maybe I'm more of an anthropologist than a journalist; people are a lot more than sources of information. Also got interviewed (on-camera this time) this afternoon so we'll see how that goes.



We have... working... games. They're demoing at the midway check-in right now, and we've got a memory game, an Incredible-Machine-like physics simulation, an Abalone board, a flower breeding game, Reversi... and the games that were working last night (along with more that are very, very close to playable). (3D-pong just got a rousing round of applause - the levels have different-shaped paddles, gravity going down, sideways...)



Lunch was an adventure. Yifan, Bryce, Jessi, Boris, and I sliced and diced our way through obscene amounts of lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and bell peppers - and even more obscene amounts of bread - to make sandwiches to feed a small army, wrapping them in loads of paper towels (with scrawled marker letters indicating which ones were sundried-tomato-beef-cheese-onion and which were honey-mustard-ham-lettuce-pepper-mayo or whatever other permutation we could find), wrapped those in clean garbage bags, and trundled them in a rickety cart through three buildings, an elevator, and rain... and rain... and rain. When Yifan and Boris began unwrapping the sandwiches, there was a collective murmur of "ohmigod" at the sheer volume. We had perhaps 10 cubic feet of sandwich. Probably more. Dinner involved the largest pot of spaghetti I have ever cooked, along with the realization that with said spaghetti one could feed an entire conference for a little over $1 a head.



Judging tomorrow. Whee!