By Liz Cormack, Marketing Manager, The Tap Lab

Have you ever heard John Lennon’s first song? It was called “Hello Little Girl,” and it was, well, bad.

What about Steven Spielberg’s first commercial film? It was called Firelight. He made one dollar from it, and that’s about what it was worth.

Riddled with imperfection, those first attempts at greatness still contained the spark that brought us two of the world’s greatest entertainers. Those works were just part of the path Lennon and Spielberg walked to get to their greatest accomplishments – the same path that must be followed for any musician, director, or even video game designer.

Creating that first, awful game is essential. Mistakes will be made, lessons will be learned, and great game developers will be born.

More than ever before, jumping into game design and iterating quickly is possible even for those with little or no experience. Dave Evans, an independent game designer at Hybrid Mind Studios in Cambridge, worked as a programmer in the corporate world for years before opening his own studio in 2009. His career was in large part the result of a childhood filled with copying code from the back pages of borrowed magazines.

“The tools are available now – you can make games without being a high tech programmer,” he said. “It’s a skill like anything else, and the more that you make small games, the better you’ll be getting at game design.”

Any game designer remembers his or her first-ever attempt at creating a game. From copying reams of code line for line from a magazine, to turning your college campus into a mobile battleground, a game designer’s initial experience often teaches lessons he or she will remember for the rest of their career.

For Evans, making a mistake can be a catalyst for something new. “Sometimes a mistake can be a bug that gives you a different idea. It can give you a whole new idea for a game mechanic,” he said.

This past March at PAX East 2013, a massive video game expo in Boston, four local game designers gathered together to share hilarious and insightful stories of their own first games on the "I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours" panel. In a room packed full of aspiring game designers, industry insiders Alex Schwartz of Owlchemy Labs, Seth Sivak of Proletariat Inc., Dave Bisceglia of The Tap Lab, and Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan Games told their personal tales of 60-hour work weeks, crazy mistakes, and the leap they made into game development.

Three gaming legends have also recounted their own first-game-ever stories on video: Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design; Will Wright, creator of Sim City; and Raph Koster, previously lead designer of Ultima Online.

“Probably about 70 percent of the time I worked on Raid on Bungeling Bay were mistakes that I had to back out of, but those mistakes were valuable,” said Will Wright, talking about his first commercial video game title.

Ultimately, the prevailing bit of advice offered to prospective designers was to just get started. Build games, and get them out there. Prototype, play-test, and have a blast doing it.

“Life is short, and games are really, really fun to make,’ said Sivak.

Besides what you learn in the process, the feeling when you finally build and ship a completed game can be extremely empowering. “There’s something about making something that you can build a community around,” said Bisceglia. “it sends shivers down your spine when you launch a game. People get into it and you’re playing it with them.”

Sivak emphasized the importance of getting your game into the hands of players early on. While making a gesture-based game in college, he told the story of their team's first 8-year-old play tester who couldn’t swing the Wii remote hard enough to make anything happen. “We were a bunch of 20-something year old males, and we turned the Wii remote gyroscope all the way up to 5 Gs,” he said.

The videotaped stories from Wright, Koster and Schell sparked the realization that such videos could be shared with aspiring game designers everywhere. So we figured, why stop at PAX? We’re building a community of a game designers and developers to promote making games – and mistakes! – and we’d love for you to join us.

Subscribe to YouTube.com/1stGameEver and get in touch at liz[at]thetaplab.com to let us know whose story you’d like to hear next. We’ll be posting new interviews every week, featuring all kinds of designers, from our neighbors in the Indie MEGABOOTH to Henry Smith, creator of Spaceteam.

After showing a hilarious video of his first attempt at building an Unreal 2004 Mod at the First Game Ever panel, Alex Schwartz put it best: “Your first games are going to stink – if you keep doing what you’re supposed to be doing, what you’re trying to do…” you’ll eventually have a terrific story to help inspire all those eager, budding designers at PAX and beyond.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Scot Osterweil, creative director, MIT Education Arcade

In the opening to David Lodge’s wonderful comic novel Small World, he likens a group of academics on a swing through a series of conferences to Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims, revealing themselves as they swap stories. I thought of that novel as I spent the past month attending five conferences; one here at MIT, and four on the other side of the continent.

It’s not hard to find the humor in conference-going, with its share of self-promoting speakers, not to mention the ever-present networking. I flew off to the majority of these meetings filled with more dread than anticipation. But at each of them, I found myself pleasantly surprised by the things I learned, either through presentations or conversations. Each such positive moment was a reminder of the importance of human interaction in our construction of knowledge.

In our daily lives we are bombarded with too much information. At its best, the conference represents an opportunity to experience the affect and enthusiasm of the presenter, enabling new ideas to cut through the fog of the familiar.

A small example from Sandbox Summit, the conference we hold here at the MIT Education Arcade: One session involved a conversation with Harvard professor of cognition Howard Gardner, who, among other things, briefly summarized the work of philosopher John Dewey. Dewey’s notions of experiential learning -- that we primarily learn by doing -- are the basis for modern progressive education. They are also fundamental to our approach to game design.

We believe that through digital games, players learn to explore complex systems; and through interaction, they construct their own understanding of the processes at work. When we embed challenging academic ideas in a game, it is with the goal of helping players experience the pleasure of learning and mastery.

With Dewey’s ideas as the bedrock of our own practice as learning game designers, we may forget how little those ideas have penetrated beyond our circle of colleagues. But at Sandbox Summit, I had a chance encounter with the head of a trade group that represents toy makers. He had never heard of Dewey, or the notion that we learn best by doing, and was fascinated and affected by Gardner’s talk.

That trade group leader was gaining new insight into the audience his industry serves, reminding me again that game designers need to be in an ongoing dialogue with a broader public. It was the kind of teachable moment that is peculiar to conferences designed to open up conversation between industry and academia. I’d argue that only in a setting like that would we have made the human connection that made that learning possible.

Scot Osterweil is the creative director at MIT’s Education Arcade. He has designed games for computers, handheld devices, and multi-player on-line environments, including the acclaimed Zoombinis series of math and logic games, Vanished, the MIT/Smithsonian Curated Game (middle grades environmental science), Lure of the Labyrinth (middle grades math) and The Radix Endeavor (high school biology and math).

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Dr. Gita Sukthankar, assistant professor, University of Central Florida

Ever wonder how a character in a video game knows the right thing to say? Or have you been frustrated when your non-player companion messes up an easy tactical move? If so, come to the Ninth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) on October 14-18th, 2013, at Northeastern University. That will be the place to talk about what works and doesn’t work when it comes to artificial intelligence in computer games.

After several years in California, the conference is coming to the vibrant game development community of Greater Boston. AIIDE 2013 is being sponsored by two local companies -- Charles River Analytics and Boston Dynamics -- that work on the more "serious" facets of game research: simulation, modeling, and training.

Artificial intelligence (AI) design utilizes smart agents that are capable of perception, cognition, and action in complex environments. Many aspects of game development and design can benefit from the use of artificial intelligence techniques, including behavior authoring, level generation, play-testing, player modeling, and structuring narrative flow. At AIIDE, there are presentations on algorithmic improvements to animation, planning, natural language processing, and machine learning. The conference unites attendees to network and swap ideas about entertainment applications of the future, including areas such as personal robotics and computer-generated art.

One new topic at AIIDE is the use of machine learning techniques for player modeling and game analytics. These techniques can be used to understand customer preferences, tune the in-game experience, and discover fraudulent trading activities. Many games include telemetry systems, originally designed for debugging, that can be used to collect general data about game play. The study of user log histories can reveal statistical trends of behavior; The challenge is sifting through terabytes of data to discover what the players like and dislike based on subtle shifts in the frequency of the their action selections.

This year, AIIDE will host a new workshop in game analytics, along with workshops on intelligent narrative technologies, game aesthetics, musical metacreation, and serious games.

The main conference will feature talks from prominent researchers and game developers, including Richard Evans (Linden Lab), Dr. Fox Harrell (MIT), Aleissia Laidacker (Ubisoft), and John Abercrombie (Irrational Games). New to 2013: The conference will offer a "playable experiences" track to showcase applications that use AI in novel ways to affect the user's playing experience.

The event will also host the 2013 StarCraft bot competition, which is designed to foster and evaluate the progress of AI research applied to real-time strategy (RTS) games. There will be a man vs. machine demonstration, pitting the winner of the AI competition against an accomplished human player.

Often we think of research advances as being a means of enhancing human productivity, but AIIDE shows the equally important ways that artificial intelligence can bring entertainment, enjoyment, and new experiences into people's lives.

For more information, please see http://www.aiide.org/ or follow on Twitter @AIIDEConference.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Dan Basoli, economist, Abt Associates Inc.

Ah, coffee – sweet nectar of life, without which we just can’t function. And yet, we’re practically obsessed with reducing what we spend for our daily caffeine fix. Or at least, I am. After I smashed my coffee pot carafe against the side of the kitchen sink last week – a fate I knew was inevitable – I faced a truly dreadful decision: Do I upgrade to a Keurig-style K-cup system, or stay with the more traditional, dineresque, drip-style brew system?

No doubt, the K-cup system is great, brewing a virtually instant cup ‘o Joe without the hassle of dealing with a whole pot. (Instant coffee, with its wretched taste, is out of the question). But what is this convenience going to cost me? Do I really want to spend that on a coffee maker, and what about having to buy these K-cups?

Naturally, as one in my field (economics) tends to do, I quickly determined that this question called for a spreadsheet calculator. The calculator compares the average cost-per-cup of coffee over the life of the appliance for both styles, based on your answers to a few simple questions. You can download it here: Coffee Maker Calculator.xls

It is clear that the K-cup style system generally costs more than a basic drip-style system, but as it turns out, our personal coffee drinking habits do matter when considering the trade-off between different styles of coffee makers. Are you a savvy shopper who will hunt down the best price for K-cups, or do you tend to waste a lot of coffee down the drain when using your drip-style carafe? Then a K-cup system might be an economical option. Do you rarely ever make coffee at home? Then you’ll probably find the drip-style carafe system more economical. And of course, the up-front cost for the appliance itself matters, too.

Try the calculator. See what works for you. Interestingly, I ended up going with a hybrid approach: a single-serve appliance utilizing a reusable K-cup filter. I get the convenience of quickly making a single cup at a time, while still being able to buy relatively less expensive bags of ground coffee.

Dan Basoli is an economist with Abt Associates Inc. in Cambridge, MA (dbasoli@yahoo.com).

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.