Dreamlab: VR research at Parsons.

Next year, me and Kyle are starting a (very small) virtual reality ("VR") research lab at Parsons. We've set our initial long-term research initiative as some sort of "virtual sculpting studio" -- so maybe one day you'll put on your Oculus Rift and power gloves, sculpt some virtual clay, and then send the model to a 3D printer? Wouldn't that be cool? We have lots of other ideas too, but those will require a lot more money / space / time, so this is us, thinking "small."

If you think it sounds awesome, please "like us" (ugh) on this weird startup grant social media platform thing so some giant well-funded entity can give us money. Or, if you happen to be a corporate or nonprofit entity that has money you'd like to part with, please get in touch.

The full proposal text is here:

We envision virtual reality as a “place” that allows us to do useful work and experience unique phenomena. Much like going to a woodshop to work wood, or a kitchen to work food, we imagine dedicated VR spaces for people to work and play with data in intuitive ways. How can we use the unique affordances of virtual realities to visualize, embody, and interface with virtual data most effectively?

A letter to a letter

Dear Raph Koster's Letter to Leigh,

You were right when you said that the authors of "personal games" would probably take you the wrong way... It's hard not to. It's impossible to divorce the politics from the forms of these games, which, yes, makes them difficult to critique as formal designed objects without appearing to attack their politics.

These authors argue that "apolitical formalism" is inherently political, that the worst politics pretends it's not politics. Porpentine tweeted that she prefers "blatant bullshit over honeyed poison." (Uh, she was talking about you, by the way!)

I'm sure you'll understand these authors' reluctance to trust this kind of criticism after the past decade of sustained critical attack on such games and their contexts -- perhaps these "crimes" weren't always inflicted by you or whatever, but it's certainly a trigger when you begin your letter with wondering, "what is a game?" My brain shifts into red alert. That line of inquiry has been a long favored tool of well-intentioned oppression, because these arguments often masquerade as thoughtful discourse but function as a weapon of de-legitimization, that argue these personal games can't really fit a formal definition of game. The emotional leap is that these people can't really fit a formal definition of people. Adding, "it's okay if it's not a game" comes off as sounding like, "it's okay if you're not a person," which doesn't really help you seem apolitical.

Again, you're aware of this. You are a very carefully written letter.

Summer 2013 @ NYU GameCenter

This summer, I'll be teaching 6 week Unity studio intensives at NYU Game Center. The "regular" class during the semester is usually 15 weeks, so trying to fit all that material into a summer course will be, uh, interesting.

The sessions themselves are pretty expensive, but I believe that they do count for credit that you can put toward a degree. I believe non-students can also take it for non-credit status, which might be cheaper? Unfortunately, I don't set the price, so all I can do is to try to help you get your moneys' worth. You can look at the Github for "Building Worlds", the (15 week) Unity course I'm teaching at Parsons right now -- as well as a blog post on my general approach to game development education.

You'll, uh, also get to hang out with me, I guess. That's a perk, right?

Course catalog at Radiator University, Spring 2013

If I had a university, these are some of the courses I'd run:

GD 202: LEVEL DESIGN STUDIO: SPACE AND DATA
There are two paradigms of level design in video games: the level as a constructed space, an architectured environment -- and the level as pattern of challenges, a series of situations and encounters. Students will build floorplans in Doom and engineer enemy attack waves for bullet-hell SHMUP games, build custom chess and checkers boards, and populate Skyrim dungeons with systemic parameters. We will also read an introductory body of architectural criticism and attempt to realize that theory as first person levels in Unity. In the end, we will argue that space and data are actually the same.
(4 credits; meets twice a week; satisfies "Spatial" breadth req.; Paris campus only)

DH 100: INTRODUCTION TO DIE HARD 1 STUDIES
This is the introductory course to Die Hard 1 Studies for students interested in majoring in Die Hard 1. We will watch Die Hard 1 every three weeks. In between screenings, we will read the novel it is based upon ("Nothing Lasts Forever" by Roderick Thorp), play Die Hard Arcade, tour several local modernist skyscrapers, and re-create scenes from the film in both analog and digital formats. By the end of the semester, students will be able to argue persuasively that Die Hard 1's many sequels do not actually exist.
(3 credits; meets once a week; bring your helicopter pilot license to the first class)

Portrait of the game designer as a young artist: Avant-Garde, by Lucas "AD1337" Molina

In the short but esteemed tradition of "games about being a struggling artist in the art world", like Jonathan Blow's Painter or Pippin Barr's Art Game, here comes the new and charming RPG-sim Avant-Garde. Look, it even has its own domain name and everything.

Approaches to game development education.

I'm currently teaching a Unity class at Parsons called "Building Worlds" -- and I'm treating it as my opportunity to get everything right and Solve All Problems in Game Dev Education... Obviously, the reality of the class is much more complicated, and ambitious teaching philosophies never really survive a semester intact.

But before I become bitter and jaded, here are the main principles / pillars I'm starting with:

0) Game development is not game design. The former concerns process, implementation, and engineering, the latter is the art of theoretically abstracting behaviors and relationships into something compelling.

1) Breadth. Everyone should know a bit of every aspect of game development, a "liberal arts" education in all facets of development, and everyone should be able to make a game entirely by themselves. All developers should have basic drawing / modeling skills, basic coding skills, and basic design skills. Of course, everyone has their specialties and interests, but the goal of game development education should be to produce independent, T-shaped developers who can see the big picture and collaborate when they need to. Don't specialize too early.

On Limits and Demonstrations, and games as conceptual art.

This is a sort-of-review about Limits and Demonstrations, by Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy. It gets just a little spoiler-y, but not in a way that'd seriously compromise your enjoyment.

Most people play chess with pieces and a board, but to many players that's not the actual game -- it's just a mnemonic aid, a thing that keeps track of chesspiece locations so you don't have to remember where your rook is. The people who live and breathe chess, however, can play chess just by reading chess notation in a book, which is to say that the game takes place entirely in their minds. This is more or less what happens when you lose a heated multiplayer match of Starcraft and agonize over what you could've should've didn't do, and wonder what alternate paths you might've taken. Likewise, I'd imagine the most skilled Starcraft players can play Starcraft entirely in their minds.

It's not just in games either: Beethoven was deaf but he could imagine the notes and harmonies so well that it didn't matter, and a Chinese concert pianist was jailed for 6 years but stayed skilled by "practicing in his head."

But I think game designers, designing games directly as a form of conceptual art, is still a relatively new thing.

My Spring 2013 at Parsons

This semester at Parsons, I have two things going on:

1) I'm teaching an undergrad / grad studio elective course.

Currents: Building Worlds was originally pitched as an "introduction to Unity" class, but then the administration said that Parsons never conducts purely "software" classes. They suggested teaching Unity through some sort of theoretical lens -- and the class design is probably much better for it. So now, it's kind of an intro to Unity / C# / working with expressive 3D / architectural theory class, and it argues for "3D" as a unique expressive medium in itself. There's also a strong focus on discussing "behaviors" theoretically, and how to combine simple behaviors to produce some sort of emergence... whether that's what constitutes a "world." I think I'll assign a chapter of 10 PRINT as a reading? (The "Currents" prefix is like a disclaimer -- "This course is an experiment. Take it at your own risk.")

2) I'm also a "consultant" / aide / "technologist" on another course, taught by Colleen Macklin / John Sharp / Heather Chaplin.

Datatoys is a collaborative class between journalists and design students to re-imagine journalism as a toy -- to turn data into interactive systems that demonstrate patterns of behavior. "Let's face it," began the journalism professor, "reading the New York Times is really boring. Print journalism is dying. Now, what is the journalism of the future?" What are the politics inherent in toys and play? How do we reconcile that with the ethics of journalism? If play is independent and unstructured, does that resemble how journalistic objectivity is independent? Can players act as journalists? How and when do toys lie?

The multidisciplinary nature of these two courses is what makes them conceptually strong and compelling, yet also very difficult to realize into actual designed things... But if they were easy, then they probably wouldn't be worth doing.

some more words on the AAA manshooter / text games

I have a knack for sending too much material to journalists when really they just want a quote or two. I promise to stop doing that. In the meantime, John Brindle's posted up the rest of my response from a piece he did about text / introspection / war games. It's cross-posted here, with some marked edits.

Teaching game development community.

In Spring 2013, I'll be teaching an undergrad / grad Unity course at Parsons called "Currents: Building Worlds."

The course has a few learning goals -- (a) to gain a broad conceptual understanding of how Unity works across art assets and code, (b) to learn some useful software engineering patterns for games, (c) to develop self-sufficiency for solving Unity problems / "learn how to learn", and lastly (d) to recognize membership in a global game development community.

That last one's probably the most ambitious.

Radiator Blog: Three Year Anniversary

Wow, I've been blogging here for about 3 years now. This blog is now approaching the end of its toddler years. Much like last year, and the year before, here's a "greatest hits" compilation of this past year's posts:

(Oh, and feel free to have some cake. Forks and plates are over there, on the table.)

GAME ARCHITECTURE CRITICISM

• Why game architecture matters and the reality / unreality of de_dust. If digital life is real-life, then digital places are real places. QED.
• The shape of crime and escape. Notes from a BLDGBLOG panel / talk on heists and bank design, and me trying to apply it to game architecture. Sort of a sequel to last year's "On the first person military manshooter and the shape of modern warfare" which takes off from another BLDGBLOG talk on military infrastructure as war.
• Infinite Omaha. I went to the real-world Omaha Beach, then compared it to various video game portrayals of Omaha. 
• The shadow of the white cloud: architecture criticism at the 1893 World’s Fair and BioShock Infinite. These days, I'm more reluctant to credit the upcoming BioShock Infinite with intellectual subtlety -- it's a game where you shoot men while riding ziplines -- but still, "City Beautiful" is one of the most influential and distinctly traceable trends in architecture ever. It's also a forerunner to thought on Disneyland, theme parks, and "artificial" architecture.
• A short history of non-monoplanar first person movement. The biggest con of non-monoplanar movement is that it's hard to make giant impressive sweeping landscape levels: you're usually either stuck inside a padded room, or you're running outside on an asteroid, and neither offers a grand vista because you're either inside or outside but rarely just off to the side. The horizon is always shifting.
• What makes good writing on level design? I think writing is best when it's specific, and here I try to articulate what I like about certain writers' styles.
• On Joiner and the cult of greeble. If Sleep No More spams readables to show how much money went into it, then TF2 maps spam meticulous func_detail brushwork to imply the mastery and skill of the level designer. What happens when you automate the writing of readables, or automate the placement of detail? I think indie developers are more conscious of the cult of detail than AAA devs, mostly because detail is expensive to add.

COMMISSIONS

• Level With Me, a post-mortem. A Portal 2 mod I did for Rock Paper Shotgun. The level design is some of my better work, and I like the idea of game journalism in the form of games, but it seemed somewhat cooly received. I have to conclude that it must simply be not as good as I think it is... or that Portal 2 players are super lame.
• The Future of the FPS, written for PC Gamer UK in issue 240. A short essay and list of really cool indie FPS games and how they're changing the genre, kind of the basis for my later RPS series. Thanks Graham!
• A People's History of the FPS. A three-part essay series for Rock Paper Shotgun that argues mods are transcending their video game bodies, becoming genuine culture that is increasingly independent of the products that they're meant to be "modding" and adding value to.

ON GAME NARRATIVE

• The myth of psychological realism in narrative. Argues that thinking of fictional characters as "people" is meaningless for a writer. It is much more useful to write by thinking of a character as a vehicle for plot, and let the player fill-in character for themselves.
• Dishonored fails as an immersive sim in its first minute. The simulation should be "immersive" -- meaning, the scope of it should be consistent and everywhere. Scripting special cases goes against this genre dogma.
• Dishonored uses the Heart to lie to you. You'd expect the Heart to be an unreliable narrator of some sort, but it doesn't lie to you with narrative -- it lies to you through gameplay and psychological framing.
• "Stair K": architecture criticism, Thief, and a coffee maker. Situates Thief as dialog on social class and urban architecture. (e.g. stairs are invisible to rich people who take taxis, not subways, and frequent buildings with abundances of elevators) It argues that in Thief, stealing is framed as an ethical act because the rich deny the truth and infrastructure of cities.
• Thief 1's "Assassins" and its environmental storytelling. I really hate the type of analysis that just thinks of game narrative as a static text that you read -- game narrative is also a game design tool, a way to make the game better to play. Games tell stories, yes, but those stories tell games too.
• What do simulations simulate? Argues that a simulation gap is important for framing a narrative.
• The structure of Sleep No More (part 1, no spoilers) and (part 2, detailed and spoilery). You paid a lot to see this damn show everyone's raving about and now you're inside, on a timer. Are you going to spend your valuable time (a) reading faint scribbles on random pieces of paper under a dim flickering light-bulb or (b) follow the crazy naked people who have an interpretive dance orgy in a blood-smeared disco?
  
  I still think a lot of "game critics on Sleep No More" like the idea of it more than how people actually consume it -- unfortunately, reading is boring and performance is captivating. So I argue the readables function as set dressing to assure you of the production's expense, not to serve as barely coherent narrative in a familiar plot that's hundreds of years old. Of course, the dancing's fantastic, but I guess it's hard to argue for the value of dance to gamer culture.
• Rule Databases for Contextual Narrative. On modding Valve's dynamic self-branching conversation system and using it to author dynamic self-branching narrative, and how Emily Short's already doing something like that, naturally. I think it's one of the more promising directions toward a holy grail of procedural narrative.
• Balls and conversation: let's narrativize the sports genre. I really love baseball movies, but I'm really bored by the focus on statistics, which is probably why Moneyball sucked. There's a rich tradition of sports narratives in film and literature, but in video games it's conspicuously absent. Let's change that.
• "Do you think shooters take themselves too seriously?" We watch blockbusters in a special way, I think, but the gulf between action films and action games is this: the films are structured to be human and sympathetic, but games are sociopathic and mean. This is a game narrative writing problem.

ON GAME CULTURE

• Frog Fractions should really win something at the IGF.
• On appreciating the UV texture flat as fine art. Here, I propose three aesthetic modes for enjoying texture flats on their own merits and glorifying them as authentic game art, rather than the silly concept art we parade as game art. I later re-wrote this piece for Game Developer magazine, as "Loving the Bones."
• Desperate Gods and rules-forcing in games. Pretty recent, but I think it's a good summary of current thought on the issue -- if you can play a game of Starcraft in your head, and Starcraft exists fundamentally more as a mental construct than a product, then why can't we just argue the rules of Starcraft in the same way we interpret and amend the laws of board games.
• On grad school for games / what studying at Parsons was like. Imagine a cohort of game developers from all around the world, and 50% are women, and 10% aren't straight people. Parsons is like the rainforest: diverse, beautiful, and vital to the global ecosystem -- but it's also humid, with lots of insects everywhere, and it's constantly in danger of deforestation. It's not for some people, while others will really grow to love it.

GAME CONFERENCE / FESTIVAL NOTES

• Why Indiecade is the best games conference / festival I've ever been to. It might sound like hyperbole but it really isn't.
• I spoke at Games for Change this past year, on LGBTQ attitudes and developers in games. It went great. I began with "I'm Robert Yang, and I'm a practicing homosexual" -- and the entire auditorium erupted in applause and cheering. It was an amazing feeling.
• Notes on the Games for Change industry. Fun fact: I got into an argument with a G4C speaker in the comments. His stance -- yeah the games suck, but people want to put a lot of money into this, so just accept it. My stance -- art should be a free or reasonably available public good, not a product.
• How the worst part of the game industry uses PAX East to teabag your entire face with its cancerous scrotum. I encourage everyone to go to at least one big mass market game convention, because that's when you will know what "indie" really means and you'll realize how small, puny, and insignificant we "video game intelligentsia" really are. The sheer amount of money being thrown around in this industry is insane -- the money spent on a 20-foot tall Blops booth-complex, blaring out noise at a regular interval, is a huge contrast to the humility and humanity of indie game culture.
• What were the main trends of GDC 2012? A look-back on what happened and what stuck out as significant.

UNITY TUTORIALS / RESOURCES

• Shader-based worldspace UVs ("triplanar") in Unity. The worst thing about BioShock's environments is the cookie-cutter feel of the game architecture, the result of modular building in game engines today. The scale and proportions don't feel human or plausible. To me, one answer is to embrace old school BSP construction techniques with procedural UVs so that you can scale your primitives to arbitrary sizes without texture stretching.
• How to integrate Unity and Twine. Notes on Unity's web player JS hooks, and how that can feed into Twine's JS, or any webpage's JS, really.
• How to dig holes in Unity terrains. How to use depth mask meshes to selectively mask geometry, then disable the terrain collider temporarily.
• The best Unity tutorial writer in the world. He really is. I'd pay him to write a book, in fact, but unfortunately I'm poor.

A bit about Convo.

Convo is a tactical squad romance about applied linguistics and binge drinking.

I remember when I was of legal age (okay, well, of kinda somewhat legal age) and I started going to bars. Who teaches you how to behave at a bar? How do you know how much to tip a bartender if at all ("$1 a drink, usually, in the US") or what tabs are ("you pay when you leave") -- is it weird if you're there by yourself? (Sometimes.) When do you buy a round for everyone? (Sometimes.) When is it okay to check your phone? (It depends.) There are all these rules of socialization that we internalize without thinking, practicing them until they become reflex. Different bars in different places have different rules, and we wordlessly sensitize ourselves to each arena.

But even before we enter bar culture, we get socialized at a much more basic level -- in the art of conversation. How do you know when it's your turn to talk? When can you make a joke? When can I leave a conversation?

My prototyping process has involved a lot of linguistics research along these lines, mainly focusing on an old (now somewhat irrelevant?) branch of applied linguistics called "conversation analysis." It might be really hard to teach an AI just how to time its responses and get into the rhythm of things, but there are 5 year olds who effortlessly achieve gapless conversation on a daily basis. I find that fascinating -- and where there's elegance and an element of timing, there's strategy and a game.

To be clear, my goal isn't to solve "procedural conversation generation" in any way, but rather to sidestep it. Convo is NOT about "what" you say or "how" you say it -- it's mostly about "when" you say it.

I'll post more about Convo as I develop it.

The shape of crime and escape.

From "Payday: The Heist"

I went to another BLDGBLOG / Studio-X event: "Breaking Out Breaking In." This time, it was a panel with FBI agents, crime experts, and architects, all focusing on heists: what does it mean to break into a bank and how should we approach bank design?

As I sat there, I pondered a much, much, much more important question: how does it affect the ways we design video games and levels about heists. How should we abstract the heist?

"A People's History of the First Person Shooter" at the No Show Conference at MIT.

If you'll be in the Boston area, come see me (and a bunch of smart people) talk about games at the No Show Conference running from July 14th to July 15th at MIT. Hopefully there'll be some kind of livestream or webcast thing available. I'll fill you in on those details when I get them.

My talk is called "A People's History of the First Person Shooter."

Now, I love stuff like 7DFPS, but I disagree with some of the reasoning behind it -- that the FPS genre, in particular, is creatively dead and requires an injection of indie ingenuity. That's wrong; indies have been working in the FPS space for nearly as long as the FPS genre has existed, and continue to make amazing innovative work.

It just plays into the fact that the popular history of the genre is largely a company history, written by the big winners.

My goal is to outline an alternate narrative of game developer history, to talk about the need and methodology for a game developer history, and to explicate some currents of thought running through the cutting edge of first person design in the indie scene.

(If you're in the New York City area instead, I highly recommend attending the annual Come Out and Play festival and the annual NYC MP3 Experiment, both at Governor's Island this coming weekend.)

Games for Change 2012, thoughts

This is from last year but it pretty much looked the same

A friend of a friend said the atmosphere was "masturbatory." I think that's about 50% accurate. Not much criticism goes on here, everyone just pumps each other up about their ventures and start-ups and whatnot. (I'm guilty of perpetuating this culture too; my "gay rant" consisted more or less of patting everyone on the back.)

But is there anything wrong with masturbation? It feels great, it doesn't hurt anyone, they should do what they enjoy -- so yeah, mixed feelings here.

I watched one presentation by the Tate, where basically they had a bunch of money and wanted to make games inspired by Alice in Wonderland -- and in a breathtaking squandering of opportunity and resources, they chose to reskin a pipe dream game / a matching cards memory game -- followed by some patronizing videos of mouth-breathing adults talking about how you used the memory in your brain to memorize cards.

And all around the auditorium, with my eyes like dinner plates, I saw people eagerly taking notes and celebrating this as something other than a profound lack of imagination that utterly betrays its subject material.

One feels almost as if G4C could use a bit of the drama that engulfs GDC / IGF each year.

Text of my "Gay Rant" at Games for Change 2012

I spoke at Games for Change 2012. It was very well-received, and I'm so relieved because I wrote and re-wrote this speech like 20 times, revising it constantly in the nights before the festival. Here's the full text, though I ended up flubbing some of the lines as well as running a few seconds over.

Hi, I'm Robert Yang. I'm an indie game developer as well as a practicing homosexual.

"How to “Get Better”: Approaches to LGBTQ-relevant Video Games" at Games for Change Festival 2012

So on Tuesday, I'll be speaking at the 2012 Games for Change Festival at NYU about gay stuff in video games. Me and MIT-Gambit darling Todd Harper were originally going to tag team it, but as the schedule got finalized, the logistics for Todd zipping down here got less tenable, so now I'm just going to be dancing on my own.

I've been scheduled in a 5 minute time slot labeled "Rants" on Tuesday at 12:15 noon, on the main stage. That's just 5 minutes to foam at the mouth about heterosexual tyranny!

It's been difficult writing this talk because I don't really know the demographics of the audience here -- from what I can grok, it's mostly government / NGO education groups, some private sector education people, and the odd sprinkling of AAA game industry. (That means no Mass Effect jokes; that means an entire audience will lack fundamental video game literacy for a talk about video games; that means I'm screwed.)

But, uh, we'll see how it goes.

Dan Lockton's Design with Intent

Design with Intent

I remember reading Dan Lockton's original PhD blog, like, 5-6 years ago, and being impressed by his ability to explain usability concepts with his many real-life examples. One of the bigger problems in usability design today, I think, is that it's often theoretical or just pulls the rote academic examples from Donald Norman.

What I like best about Design with Intent is that it doesn't preach usability or design as a religion: bad design and obfuscated design, just like good design, can be important tools depending on your goals.

Anyway. If you're not familiar, and you have some sort of interest in level / game / any design at all, then flip through this slideshow and let Lockton crack a few eggs of wisdom on you.

7dfps, halftime report

Hey! I've been chugging away on my 7 Day FPS entry, "The Leaden Circles," a single player squad FPS based on Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway. I was planning on cross-posting all my updates here, but I decided it would've been too much, so read all my daily dev posts over there.

I also want to draw your attention to some other entries I've been watching:

"Table For One" tasks you with being an utter glutton, re-imagining Dinner Date as a physics puzzle with a playful Natural Selection-ish skulk cam perspective (best. view model. ever.) because hey, don't we see with our mouths sometimes? The current build is absurdly difficult, at least to me, so I hope he makes it easier!

"Europa Concept" looks like some sort of high fidelity sci-fi survival thing about crash-landing on one of Jupiter's moons (Europa is one of Jupiter's moons, right?) and managing your inventory and crafting and shooting, or something. The developer's quite a Unity veteran, so I'm sure this'll be pretty slick in the end.

Parsons post-mortem: "Games and..."

Parsons is a bit of a secret games school: they don't advertise much, and the students / faculty rarely shill for the program. (I'm an exception, I guess.)

I enjoyed my time here, but it's not for everyone. I find most prospective students are trying to decide between Parsons / NYU / USC or something, so this post is mostly tailored to them. (There's also a tl;dr at the bottom.)

Here are, what I think, the strengths of studying games at MFA Design and Technology at Parsons:

• Diversity. A Model UN's worth of international students. About 40-50% of the students / faculty are women. Also, there's a healthy LGBT presence and culture, e.g. some of our bathrooms are branded "gender-inclusive", and ~10% of our cohort was LGBT. Some students are 36 year old engineers; some are 24 year old dancers and biologists. Altogether, this makeup is VERY rare in the monoculture that is the technology / games field.
• Breadth. You will go to gallery openings and interact with the larger New York City art scene. You will learn soldering, coding, and typography. You'll get a general sense of where the "new media" art scene is at, to the point where you can go to a MoMA exhibition and yawn at their curation with knowing confidence.
• Flexibility. If you realize you're not into games so much, you can totally do something else without any disruption toward your degree. Start welding something! Sew a dress! Make a video performance! Grow algae batteries! Build robots! Just start doing it and you can.
• Maturity. MFADT is a very old program (15+ years old?) compared to most dedicated games programs. The veteran faculty know what they're doing. The courses and curriculum generally work.
• New York City isn't AAA! The NYC indie scene is among the strongest in the world, with frequent meet-ups and events. Killscreen and Babycastles regularly partner with museums to do stuff, and there's always at least one games-related thing going on every weekend.

Now, as for the gaps in the program, I actually regard them as strengths, but I understand people see things differently -- so here are the "weaknesses"...