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Archive for January, 2010

Narcissism on The Biggest Loser

Jan 29

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

Robin and I are big fans of the television show The Biggest Loser.  If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a weight-loss reality show where a number of severely overweight people are taken to a “ranch” and put through an intensive training program with two top physical trainers (Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels).  They compete in weekly weigh-ins and the people or team that lose the least are put at risk of elimination.

This makes it sound like a typical sleazy reality TV show, but The Biggest Loser generally tries to stay positive, with even the contestants who are eliminated first gaining a new outlook on life and, with the help of the show, losing a large amount of weight.  It’s a very positive-sum game.

Of course, though, the risk of elimination leads to “gameplay”: exploiting the parameters of the show to optimize weight loss to when it’s most valuable.  Although it’s never discussed on the show, the tactic of choice seems to be “water loading” — drinking large amounts of water to keep body weight high.  Contestants do this when they have immunity from elimination for the week, so they can load up to display only a pound or two of weight loss, and then really show a huge loss the next week.

In the current season, the red team has done this two weeks in a row.  This isn’t unusual in and of itself, but the interaction between the trainers and the red team (Melissa and Lance) is.  Melissa is the one who’s been sandbagging, gaining a pound one week and losing one the next.  When the trainers and the host questioned her about her gain the first week, she played dumb, claiming she didn’t know why she wasn’t losing.  When she lost only one pound the second week, they really jumped on her, up to and including calling her a liar to her face.

Her reaction was interesting to me.  Although her lies on the scale are completely transparent — you know she’s lying through her teeth — she gets enraged, tearful, and defensive when confronted with that fact, and that outrage is real.  Real enough that it cowed Bob, who questioned his own knowledge of the biology of weight loss when faced with her strident denials.  Jillian wasn’t fooled, but chose to just “move forward” rather than try to crack her stonewalling.

It just didn’t make sense to me why she would:

  1. Maintain such a pointless lie about something that is a legitimate gameplay tactic, to the self-destructive point of pissing off her fellow competitors and the trainers, while
  2. Exploding in rage when her integrity was challenged.

And you’ve got to wonder what all this is going to look like to her teenage and pre-teen kids.  Great example, Mom!

She has to know this can’t continue; in fact, she miraculously lost 11 pounds this week, even though she again had immunity.  Amazing!  Two weeks with net zero weight loss, and now 11 pounds this week!  It’s a miracle!

Well, as Jillian knew, it was because you can’t realistically drink 30 pounds of water.  I’m sure she’s water-loaded as much as she can, but that’s as far as she can go, and the rest had to show on the scale.

What’s the explanation?  Particularly for the rage?  I’m guessing, in the style of The Last Psychiatrist, that it’s narcissism.

Melissa sees herself as a honest person.  Sure, she’s in a reality TV show, so she’s playing the game.  She’s lying with every word, deliberately provoking other team members, and basically acting like a huge witch, but that’s not really her.  She wants herself to be perceived based on her own internal image of herself, not on her actual actions.

That’s why Jillian and Bob calling her on her lies is such a threat to her.  “You’re calling me a liar!  My ethics and integrity are everything to me!”  Sure, they are.  In reality, her appearance as an ethical person with integrity is everything to her.  Actually behaving ethically and with integrity, not so much.

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Video Hosting Rethought

Jan 27

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in C++/C#/SQL/Web Programming, Computer | No Comments

After seeing the performance of my self-hosted video solution, I rethought the wisdom of trying to host myself.  First of all, performance from anywhere but home was pretty poor; the stream preload could keep up with the video playback, but only if everything went exactly right.  Once a hiccup occurred, it hung up and took an inordinate amount of time to recover.

Also, my upload bandwidth at home is limited.  If several people tried to view a video at the same time (I know I flatter myself, but it could happen), performance would really go down the tubes.

So I decided to host through Vimeo.  They’re free, support the features I’d like, have a nice player interface, and aren’t obnoxious like YouTube.

With luck, offsite-hosted video should be much more performant for viewers.  To test, the Vimeo-hosted Bionicle video is displayed below.  I personally think the quality is better, not to mention the performance.

Enjoy!

Bionicle from Matt Wigdahl on Vimeo.

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Video-Enabled!

Jan 25

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in C++/C#/SQL/Web Programming, Computer, Family | No Comments

I’ve now figured out how to embed home video in the blog in a nice, streaming player.  The Wordpress “Stream Video Player” plugin is the core technology; once this is in place it’s a simple matter to extract the video from the digital video camera, format it up with Windows Movie Maker (or equivalent software), convert it to a .flv file (Flash-format video), and inject streaming metadata into it.  Then you just upload and embed it into the post!

The result is a very nice embedded video player that supports random access to the video and doesn’t give you the issues that come with using YouTube.  The video is hosted locally and I can freely remove it or change it if I need to.

So here’s the first video I made — Thomas demonstrating his expertly-constructed Bionicle vehicle, complete with functioning weapon.  The age range on the box is from 9 to 16 years old; he built the whole thing himself (with just a bit of guidance from me) at age 8.  Note the complexity and the sheer number of parts, including a functioning gear train!  Also included is bonus footage of Jonathan fussing.

Edit:  I’ve removed the self-hosted movie.  See the next entry for the Vimeo-hosted version.

I Want Glue Teeth

Jan 20

Posted by robin in Family | 1 Comment

Well, Katherine is now down to one set of bottom incisors.  Her adult teeth were coming in behind her baby teeth instead of replacing them.  In December one of Katherine’s home therapy implementors discovered that an adult tooth had come in behind her baby teeth and an x-ray confirmed that Katherine was well on her way to having a second row lower incisors. With full roots still in place, the baby teeth would not come out on their own.

See photos.  The “before” shot is pretty blurry because Katherine and a cell phone camera are not a good mix.

Katherine’s substantially delayed communication skills are completely inadequate to assure cooperation for four extractions so we opted for full intravenous sedation.  So with medical paperwork submitted, a copy of her last check-up, and an on-the-spot check of vitals and weight, Katherine was cleared for sedation.

All-in-all things went very well.  With her last bit of sustenance 16 hours behind her, Katherine arrived at the dentist office with a chip on her shoulder.  She waited, mostly patiently, for 45 minutes while the anaesthesia team finished with the child ahead of her, thanks to a novel waiting room and a couple of games on my Ipod Touch.  We only had two short rounds of high-pitched shrieking and mild self-injurious behavior.  The first when she didn’t want to cooperate with the nurse taking vital signs and the second when Katherine lost patience with my attempts to take “before” shots of her lower jaw.

When we went back to the procedure room, they started with a shot of ketamine in the tush while I distracted Katherine with the game she had been playing.  Needless to say, she was on to them after that! They tried to follow the shot by taping some gauze over the injection sight and Katherine was having none of it.  There was no way she was going to trust them anywhere near her buns a second time!

A few seconds later she returned her attention to the Ipod game, a very cute little app called Cookie Doodle where you roll out, cut, bake and then decorate a cookie.  She was in the sprinkles phase of the game and I watch with amusement while her little finger tapped the screen slower and slower until her finger just rested in place on her Christmas Tree cookie.  Then I laid her gently on the dentist chair and went to the waiting room.

The dentist made good use of the unconscious state of her patient and did a full set of x-rays, a cleaning and a fluoride treatment in addition to the four extractions.  Everything went well and it wasn’t long before they let me join her in the recovery room.  She was so groggy that I wasn’t sure if she was even aware of my presence.  Then, as I began to talk to her, she started to try to get up.  She wanted to blow that Popsicle stand!  This was comical in the extreme because she couldn’t even hold her head up!  Her eyes were still half closed!  But she repeatedly succeeded in dropping a foot off one side or other of the dentist chair.

To keep her from falling on the floor and because I thought it would be her preference, I slid her onto my lap.  She was more content there but asked for “car” and “coat” and then “I want saxophone” (don’t ask me where that last one came from but she said it very clearly).  After realizing that, at least for a short while, I would need to support her head like a newborn infant, I requested the use of the wheelchair that I had earlier declined.  I didn’t think I could adequately support her lanky 45 lbs all the way to the car plus I wanted the opportunity to get her booster in a reclined position so she wouldn’t fall out of it during the drive home.

Katherine was in much better shape after the 25 minute trip home.  Although still quite wobbly, she was able to stand and walk on her own.  Chelsea — who had stayed with Jonathan and was secured for the entire afternoon — or I followed inches away from her for another 30 minutes to prevent any falls.  Despite the residual meds and being awake from 2:30 to 5:30 AM the previous night Katherine did not have much interest in resting and none at all in sleeping.  She was obviously hungry and thirsty but was unable to find anything to her liking until she was cleared for ice cream around 2:30.  Up to that point she had tried and rejected my soft drink and Chelsea’s (we got another chuckle when it took her three tries to get a straw in her mouth) and rejected outright two flavors of jello and two flavors of popsicle.  Fortunately a little ice cream broke the ice and she was more open to other foods after that.

With motor skills recovered and eating back on track, the missing teeth are now the only problem.  She is definitely still in pain without analgesic but that is easily handled.  The main problem is that she wants her teeth back.  She is legitimately sad that they are missing and is sporadically upset about their loss.  She is also trying out various requests to get them back.  She is most persistent with “I want glue teeth” (she asks us to glue or tape anything that is broken) but she also pleads “I want help teeth”, “I want teeth” and “Oh no, teeth”.  We just keep telling her “teeth all gone” and showing her some pictures of other kids with missing teeth.  Hopefully acceptance will come soon and we’ll be able to put the whole experience behind us!

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Update Delayed

Jan 20

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Sorry, due to lots of other stuff going on today the update will be delayed.  I’ll try to make it tonight.

Baby Eat Ham

Jan 18

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | 2 Comments

Katherine has been doing very well verbally lately since Christmas break.  Whether the cause is the reduction in stress from not having school for three weeks or just the increased time at home with people who (mostly) understand her, she is doing substantially more spontaneous commenting and complex requesting.  Rather than just fall back on her stock “I want help” phrase, which can be maddening when she won’t specify what it is that she wants, she’s now using complex and sometimes synthetic terms for things she wants.

For example, the Baby Einstein Meet the Orchestra movie for a long time was “white baby movie”, which is a good description but doesn’t narrow it down from the other Baby Einstein videos, which also come in white cases.  Just recently she further specified it as “orchestra movie” which is much more clear to us.

She also got a new Littlest Pet Shop playset for Christmas, and has been referring to it as “animal playground”, which is a description she’s definitely synthesized herself, since we just recently opened that toy up for her and I’m sure she hasn’t heard it before.  In addition to that, she’s also getting mad if Thomas tries to horn in on her new toys, which is pretty developmentally appropriate even if it does cause more friction between them at times.

Along with this increased verbosity, however, is coming some willfulness when it comes to diet.  She’s almost completely given up orange juice, and she’s balking at certain types of meat that she’s liked just fine in the not-so-distant past.  This last time it was ham.

We had a very nice little boneless ham that we were serving up for supper.  It was very tasty and tender, and Katherine ate the first bite just fine.  After that, however, the response every time we tried to get her to go for a piece was “no ham!”  We tried most of the usual incentives to get her to eat it, such as offering a chocolate chip cookie for dessert if she finished the ham, and then sweetening the deal with potato chips.  Usually that will work to get her started, but not this time.  Every gambit was met with “no ham!” and strong resistance.

Finally, after several rounds of this, Katherine took the fork and held it up to Robin’s lips and said “Mom eat ham!”  So Robin did.  This, of course, caused a light to go on in Katherine’s mind and she tried it again, only to be rebuffed.  Only one “get out of ham free” card per person.  So she turned to me, with “Dad eat ham!”  This was then followed with “Thomas eat ham!”, but that still left several pieces left on her plate.  The dogs would have volunteered to help, but they were disqualified on the grounds of inhumanity, so she got creative.  She scanned the room, and noticed that I was holding Jonathan.  She got a big smile on her face.

“Baby eat ham!”

Unfortunately, we had to make it clear that Jonathan doesn’t eat food yet, and so he was unable to help her dispose of the rest of her meat.  But it was certainly fun watching her use her brain and creativity to solve her “problem”.

We did, by the way, get her to eat the rest of the ham.  I was able to convince her that by coating it in Parmesan cheese, ordinary ham is transubstantiated into a foodstuff known as “cheese ham”, and this was acceptable to her where plain ham was not.  She ate the cheese ham, moved on, and that was the last of it.

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Sci-Fi Showdown: Avatar vs. District 9

Jan 15

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Movies, Reviews | 2 Comments

It’s pretty clear that Avatar and District 9 are the best science fiction movies of the year.  Star Trek was very good as well, but in terms of visionary content and originality it can’t really keep up with the other two, which are both truly high-water marks in science fiction filmmaking and effects technology.

I gave both movies 5/5 — which is the best of the two?

I’m going to give the nod to District 9, mostly on the basis of its plot and premise, which in my opinion is just more thought-provoking and emotionally impacting than the somewhat more formulaic but more visually impressive Avatar.

How did I arrive at that conclusion?  Let’s compare the movies and see what they have in common.  It’s more than you might think.  Both films include (mild spoilers):

  • The fundamental theme of how humanity reacts to the Other.
  • Corporations with quasi-governmental, quasi-military powers dealing with a “problem” that other governments and corporations refuse to deal with.
  • A secondary theme of transformation into the Other.
  • A secondary theme of self-loathing.
  • A secondary theme of colonialism/race relations.
  • As an antagonist, a badass tough-guy ex-military leader whose reaction is always to shoot first and ask questions later.

Of these, I think it’s very interesting to note the Reese’s peanut butter cup antagonistic power structure that exists in both films.  “You got your corporation in my military!  No, you got your military on my corporation!”  They could have just come straight out and called both organizations Blackwater or Halliburton and their point would have been crystal clear.  On the surface it seems like a garden-variety left-wing commentary on Big Business and the dangers of militarization, but I think in both cases it’s more properly seen as an anti-libertarian message.  In both films, the situation seems to be that the government has abdicated its responsibility for its particular problem with tacit public consent, much like Pontius Pilate washing his hands of responsibility for the fate of Jesus, and turned power and responsibility over to a private, profit-driven organization which is not accountable directly to the public, and which is therefore willing to do those unpleasant (and inhumane) things which must be done to control and exploit the situation.

Also interesting is the common theme of self-loathing.  Jake Sully in Avatar starts out desperately wanting to regain the function in his legs, and this speeds his alienation from humanity and his identification with the Na’vi — through the Avatar program, he regains the use of his legs in his alien body, and so naturally wants to spend all his time in it.  By contrast, Wikus in District 9 is quite happy with his life until his accidental exposure to the prawn biotech fluid.  When he begins to physically transform, he desperately wants nothing more than to reverse it, to the point of trying to cut his own extremities off.  His increasing identification with the prawn is entirely physical, and even at the end he’s still resisting, still holding out hope that he can reverse the transformation.  In Avatar, I got the sense that Jake Sully would be quite happy to never see a human being again.

It’s almost more interesting, I think, to compare how the films differ:

  • Avatar has beautiful aliens that appeal to our romanticized ideals of pre-technological life.  District 9 has aesthetically repellent aliens who wallow in filth and who live in a manner revolting to humans.
  • Avatar’s protagonists are motivated by a desire to emulate and eventually actually become Na’vi.  The main character of District 9 is willing to go to extreme lengths to avoid his own transformation, as mentioned above.
  • Avatar’s aliens behave in a comprehensible fashion — a human can readily learn their language and customs.  The aliens of District 9 are almost completely incomprehensible in language and behavior, although a few have learned English.  More to the point, the prawn of District 9 appear to have an intraspecies diversity greater than humans; there are a great many “low-caste” aliens that are either completely ignorant or utterly stupid, and a few that are extremely intelligent and competent that apparently drive their high-tech society.  The tribes of Na’vi in Avatar are egalitarian, organized on tribal lines familiar to any human anthropologist.
  • District 9, interestingly, has an alien “cute kid” that features prominently in terms of screen time and plot importance, whereas there are few if any children on-screen in Avatar.
  • District 9’s prawns are dependent on humanity for survival (for unspecified reasons) while the Na’vi of Avatar neither want nor need anything from humanity, and would be just as happy to see them all disappear.

In terms of filmmaking itself, District 9 goes for a documentary-style immediacy, while Avatar goes for big-budget blockbuster perfection.  Both have phenomenal visual effects, although I give the nod to Avatar here for the sheer scope of its worldbuilding and the deft, groundbreaking use of 3D technology.  I felt the acting was equivalent in both movies — Giovanni Ribisi and Stephen Lang were standouts in Avatar, but the other roles I thought were just good, not great.  Sharlto Copley in District 9, however, I felt did a fantastic job of portraying the difficult character of Wikus Van De Merwe, and turned in what I felt was the best, most believable and authentic performance of both movies.

When I went over these lists of similarities and differences, the main thing that crystallized for me was that the prawn of District 9 actually came across as believable aliens, for the most part, while the Na’vi ultimately didn’t, at least not the same degree.  And although I could understand the reactions, motivations, and behavior of both Wikus in District 9, and Jake Sully in Avatar, I was much more profoundly moved by Wikus’s plight.  District 9 was simply more real to me, in terms of its story.

I think others felt the same way, and a good illustration of this is seen in how the audience reacted at the end of each movie.  I saw both District 9 and Avatar in packed theaters.  At the end of Avatar, everyone in the theater was excited, animatedly getting up to discuss the movie and talk about their favorite parts.  We couldn’t wait to leave the theater and talk about all the cool stuff we’d seen.  When District 9 was over, the entire theater sat still, shocked into inanition for a minute or so, and then got up and filed out in total silence.  I’ve never experienced that before.  District 9 was that powerful, that moving, and in the end, that much better of a film.

Underclocking

Jan 13

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer | No Comments

If you’ve been reading for a while you probably remember my travails getting my new computer up with an upgraded video card.  I also got a new monitor after my old one died — this one is a full 1920×1080 widescreen LCD.  When I got the new monitor I played around a bit with running some of my games at full 1920×1080 resolution, but I haven’t had a whole lot of time to play, so I didn’t do much.

Then I upgraded to Windows 7.  Although I loved and still love Windows 7, and didn’t notice any issues at the time, a new behavior has manifested that I was not seeing before — random system restarts while gaming.

The behavior is that as soon as a game starts really driving the video card, the fan starts to spin up and at some point the screen goes black and the system restarts.  It happens at different times in different games.  Thomas’s Wizard 101 runs fine indefinitely.  Half-Life 2 runs for 20 minutes or so without a problem.  Trine and Demigod blow chunks within 2 minutes of starting up when they’re cranked up to max performance settings.

So of course I tried all the standard techniques for diagnosing and fixing these types of problems:  the video card driver update (including a full old driver sweep), various other driver updates, extensive google search, tweaking video settings, etc.  Nothing seemed to help very much.

Finally I stumbled over a reference to power consumption, which rung a bell.  That video card is running pretty close to the edge on the power supply in my box, as my earlier article went into some detail about.  What if it was slipping a bit over the edge under Windows 7 running full-out?

To test that I went into the Catalyst Control Center and unlocked the overclocking tool.  As a test, I backed off the CPU and RAM timings by 50 MHz each.  I fired up Trine and… everything works great!  Demigod?  Same thing.  Except… I did have a crash after about 15 minutes in Demigod last night, so apparently this isn’t a perfect fix.  My current settings are 100 MHz underclock on the core, RAM clock normal.  That seems to do the trick; we’ll have to see if it cripples performance too badly.  I can fiddle with the RAM clock some more, but I’m guessing it’s the core that’s really sucking down the juice anyway.

So although it’s kind of a pain to have to actually handicap the performance of my awesome video card, I’m not complaining.  I didn’t have to cripple it by much, and I’ll gladly trade a few percent on my frame rate (which is excessive in almost everything I play anyway) to eliminate random reboots.

Movie Review: Avatar

Jan 11

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Movies, Reviews | No Comments

Avatar — James Cameron

Rating:  5/5

I’m not sure which of three Avatar movies I should review:

  1. The heroic tale of the disabled Marine corporal who is sent to spy on and betray the native Na’vi aliens on the distant world of Pandora in the service of a rapacious, soulless corporation.  He eventually learns to understand and love the alien people, finally becoming both their liberator and truly one of them at the same time.
  2. The horribly tragic story of the death of humanity, desperately seeking vital resources at exorbitant cost from an unimaginably distant, completely hostile world, only to be betrayed by one of their own after diplomacy, nonlethal combat and psychological warfare have all failed to appeal to the alien savages.  In the final scene, the heroic and loyal colonel confronts the traitor, after the humans, who could obviously easily destroy all the Na’vi if they truly wanted to, are being soundly defeated as a result of their restrained, humane warfare.  He asks the traitor the cutting question “how does it feel to betray your race?”  But the traitor is too far gone to even speak at this point, and just hisses like an animal as he continues his work of selling out his species and destroying humanity’s last hope for survival, condemning billions to freeze in the dark back on the mother planet.
  3. The epic saga of a round of Starcraft 2 gone bad, as the Terrans squander a huge early tech and resource lead by trying to overexpand and create a secondary base, allowing the other side to tech to air and eventually zerg them down via an ambush in an unexplored area of the map.  If you’ve ever wondered how massed Mutalisks can take down a Yamato, this is the how-to video.  Message to Terran player:  Grow a pair.  And build more Ghosts.

I’m pretty sure James Cameron intended movie #1, which is kind of a shame, as the others would have been a bit more fresh from the perspective of plot originality (and let’s face it, this was a better Starcraft movie than any conceivable Starcraft movie could ever be).  Fortunately, the somewhat formulaic plot of movie #1 was still executed quite well, with decent acting and truly amazing cinematography and visual effects.  I saw it in IMAX 3D, which I highly recommend to anyone else who sees the movie.  The 3D is unobtrusive for the most part, but really adds to the immediacy.

Avatar is also hard science fiction, which is very unusual and very impressive for science fiction movies these days.  By “hard” science fiction I mean science fiction that sticks very closely to known physical laws as far as possible.  The space travel is sublight, with cryogenic stasis used for the passengers due to mass and life support issues.  Although “unobtainium”, the room-temperature superconductor that is the main reason for the human presence on Pandora, may not truly exist, it probably could, and its presence could explain the “floating  mountains” on Pandora that otherwise seem wildly farfetched.  Really the only piece of technology that has no reasonably extrapolated physical basis is the projection unit that projects human consciousness into an Avatar body.  It looks like an MRI machine, but apparently operates on some sort of psychic basis.

In Avatar, Jake Sully, a Marine corporal whose legs were paralyzed in combat, replaces his dead brother on a mission to Pandora.  The brother was a science PhD who had trained for years to be one of the Avatars — teleoperators of hybrid human/Na’vi bodies who were supposed to study, communicate with and build ties with the Na’vi population of Pandora, a near-human-habitable moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri system.

In his Avatar body, Jake has the use of his legs again, but on his first trip out into the wilds he gets separated from his group by the attack of a wild animal and is lost in the bush.  He is rescued by Neytiri, a young Na’vi girl and the daughter of the clan leader.  She wants to kill him but decides to take him back to their home, where — although he is distrusted — the leaders are intrigued enough by his “warrior” background to try to educate him in their ways, under Neytiri’s tutelage.

Jake then learns the Na’vi way of life, one of oneness with nature, as he learns to use the biological apparatus all Pandoran life possesses to commune with horse-analogues and pterodactyl-like flying mounts the humans nickname “Banshees”.  At the same time, the corporation in charge of resource extraction on Pandora is using the information Jake is learning to plan a relocation of the Na’vi away from their home, which happens to sit on a gigantic unobtainium deposit.

When push comes to shove, the Avatar crew, including Jake, switch sides, helping the Na’vi fight the human encroachment and protect the unique planetary network that all Pandoran life partakes in.

The worldbuilding here is fantastic.  The alien landsape, flora, fauna, and natives all look and seem completely real, and the artistic vision represented in the portrayal of Pandora is nothing short of staggering.  Details of alien physiology are consistent in many cases, and you can make interesting speculations based on the species observed as to what evolutionary paths the Na’vi took compared with other species in their world.

The human technology, also, is extremely well-realized and very believable.  Computer technology is ubiquitous and used casually in very sophisticated ways, military hardware looks advanced but operates on believable principles — even the mining hardware and the starship that starts the movie off were obviously thought through in painstaking detail.

Although the movie is over two and a half hours long, it doesn’t feel like it.  It’s well-paced and well-acted, and there is always something compelling happening on screen.  If you don’t have some sort of racial or political axe to grind, and you like science fiction at all, it’s one of the most enjoyable experiences you’re likely to have at the theater for quite some time.

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Duplo LEGO Star Wars — A Modest Proposal for the Wii

Jan 10

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Family, Games | No Comments

This is a guest post from my son, Thomas, who has a game proposal he’d like to submit to any interested developers.  So if there are any LucasArts folks trolling the blogosphere who are looking for a creative idea for a new game by a very enthusiastic Lego Star Wars fan, read on:

Dear LucasArts,

My name is Thomas Wigdahl and I want to work with you to publish a Wii game called Duplo LEGO Star Wars.  Can you help me create it?

The reason this game uses Duplos is that it’s a new idea that no one has used before.

The best part of my idea is that it has adventure in it and cool bosses that have a variety of vehicles, ships and droids.

My game would be fun to play because you can build your own vehicles and weapons.

Something new in this game is it only has five levels that are longer than Lego Star Wars levels.

Thanks!

Sincerely,

Thomas

Concept art is below:

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