Girl Meets Geekdom

Yes, I?’ve been absent for a month. I took winter break as an opportunity to pursue some random projects which I will post as I finish up. For my first post-hiatus post, I was going to write something totally relevant about the game industry or computer graphics or something, but I figured I’d scrap all that and, in honor of my new “off-topic” section, write about something completely and utterly random: body wash and loofahs.

After a conversation with my roommate’s semi-boyfriend today, it has been brought to my attention that guys are more “soap” people and tend not to go for the body wash-loofah combination. For those enlightened male individuals out there who have figured out the inferiority of bar soap, I applaud you. As for the rest of you, read on.

Forget the gentle moisturizing components of bodywash that attract the female audiences. Body wash is just more practical than bar soap. It comes conveniently bottled so its contents don’t contact the shower water, and you can bring it with you to the gym, or pour it into a smaller container for travel purposes. But most importantly it saves time. I mean, think about what you have to do to clean yourself with bar soap. First you apply the soap, which is slipping around in your hand, over the part of your body that you are cleaning. Then you have to put the soap down to work up the lather, and you have to pick up the soap again to clean another part of your body. Very often, the soap will be slippery and fall to the bottom of the shower and you have to pick it up. Of course every time you do this, the soap is getting smaller from sitting in the water. It’s completely wasteful! You can never use ALL of a bar soap. With body wash, you pour just a little into a loofah and very shortly after the loofah contacts your skin, you get a lather. Plus the lather does not go away until you are ready to rinse you loofah. Think of the efficiency. Bar soap is like washing dishes with detergent and no sponge! Why would you still use bar soap? It’s ridiculously inefficient!

As for the concern that it’s girly, pretty much every brand of bar soap has a bodywash equivalent. And sure, while you can buy very fancy scented body wash, the normal body wash that sit next to the bar soap on store shelves smell like soap. And if you still think that something as efficient as bodywash is girly, maybe it just goes to prove that women are smarter.

Anyway, I promise, next post will be on video games or something.

Okay okay, it’s an obvious fact that maintaining a blog isn’t my thing. But, I swear

, I have been meaning to update for the past three weeks, only to find my webpage rather dead. In fact, it is still dead…and I don’t know why. But, it is in the process of being fixed, and I do intend to post interesting blurbs on a somewhat regular basis, I swear!!!

My article on Game Design Education Without a Game Design Major is up! Check it out at:

24 straight hours of work, 32 hours of non-sleep, 5 Cornell Students, 1 faculty member, 1 mobile game.

This past weekend was the Mobile Game Mosh, a 24-hour game design competition hosted by Parson’s in NYC. The goal: design and make a game for a cell phone in 24 hours. We went, we worked, and we did pretty well.

What it was like:
10AM

Our team, “Two Bit Operation” , consisting of myself, Brenda Chen, John Berges, Chris John, Hari Nathan, and our faculty advisor Mohan, arrive at Parsons.

10:30AM

Tutorial time…they had problems making the multiplayer flash demo work…so immediately we decided against that…

Noon

Envelope opens, we find out the four verbs that define our design constraints: suck, grip, conjure, and fade. John proceeds to celebrate over the words “grip” and “suck.”

1PM

We start making our game in Gamemaker.

2PM

Lunch, yaaaaaay!

4PM

Overdosed on Tylenol Cold…you’re suppose to take it every 6 hours not 4!

7PM

Dinner

8:00PM
Broke out the first caffeine drink…much more to come….

8:30PM

First wave of professional game designers arrive to critique our game. First piece of advice: “Lay off the vitamin c.”

9:00PM

Major redesign

2:00AM
Pizza!

Noon

I don’t remember what happened between 2:00-noon…but we finished

Consumption (whole team):
8tbsp - Tylenol Cold Medicine
2 cans – Starbucks double shot
~15 cans – Red Bull
~40 pieces – Halls Vitamin C

Interestingly enough, the contest was partially sponsored by Red Bull…so we had an unlimited supply…

Our finished game, entitled Vac-Attack, was a sort of Tetris-like block game where you can suck in blocks and shoot them out in attempts to collide it with other blocks. Unfortunately, I think that’s all I can say…and I can’t put up a copy of the game for download because we signed our rights away too Atari when the contest started…but it’s all good.

We finished runner up in the Top Game category. The winning game, Moth, was a puzzle game developed in Flash by a group of graduate students…so I’d say they had some edge over us.

There should be press about the event out around this time, including Gamasutra and Electronic Gaming Monthly who were with us for the whole 24 hours. Also, a number of New York newspapers covered the event. Here’s the press:

• is an article about me in Chinese.
• An in the New York Metro featuring Brenda asleep on a tablet and the rest of the team (except Hari) in the background, as well as a quote from me.
• The full of the event…including a picture of me looking like a supernerd (I was sick that day, not my fault)

Anyway, it was a very exciting event…too bad I won’t be a student next year to do it again…

Next up: The Games 4 Girls Game design competition, entries due this week…wish me luck!

It’s been a rough week. On top of finalizing the mess of a course schedule I had this semester, Friday was also the day in which I had to decide between job offers from Microsoft and EA. In the end, I chose EA.

Sure, it might seem

very clear cut that a girl who blogs about graphics and game design would go for the game company, but it really was a tough call. Microsoft gave an incredibly generous job offer and the prospect of a management and feature design role as a program manager. Not to mention, the team that extended the offer was Pix Experience – a team that works with human-computer interaction, digital photography, takes random photography breaks on sunny days, and has DDR in one of their “meeting rooms.” If there was a perfect team at Microsoft that was not games-related, that was it.

So despite all this, why did I choose EA? First of all Dilbert makes fun of the position that I would’ve taken at Microsoft. Not that I actually took that into consideration. I just found it amusing while I was contemplating. A significant (and real) factor in my decision deals with my overwhelming preference for a place that carries a bit of familiarity. I’m not worried about making new friends, but I’ve been restarting in new places half my life. For once, I’d like to be in place that didn’t feel temporary. Plus, I think that people who don’t factor friends, family, and people in general into their career decisions are really missing a part of the big picture. It’s not just about networking. People inspire ideas, they get you involved in projects, and can add greatly to overall happiness. And at the risk of sounding like a fortune cookie, happiness is key to success. Also, there’s the fact that I spent three years targeting myself for a job on a production team in the entertainment industry. If there was anything I learned from Cornell, it is that success comes as a result of using your skills to its full potential, which EA wins out on. Then there’s that game industry factor. Even if I went to Microsoft, I’d want to go back into games, and, in the game industry, nothing can really stand in for industry experience.

I am hoping, like many others, to someday be a game designer. I will be getting my start at EA as a technical artist in EA Redwood Shores…hopefully on the Sims 3.