Day 3: Snakes!!

The day began with breakfast at the hotel and then a bus ride over to the Nixdorf Computer Museum. We toured the various floors and went through the history of computers and how they started as simple punch card machines. I had learned about all of these early calculators and computers in my Computer Information Technology course, so I was able to ask more in-depth questions and recognize the most important parts of the machines. As we were walked through the development of the first computer and then the earliest video games, I found a lot of it interestingly applicable to what I have learned in both IGME and the film and animation course. Because I love 3D modeling, I was interested in the art aspect of computers and video games. I was reminded of my first advanced 3D modeling assignment last year that involved finding an old, visually interesting object to model; a lot of the primitive machines and computers would have been great ideas. My affinity for hard surface modeling continued to fill up my phone’s gallery as I went through and took pictures of anything that might be a reference or even inspire new projects. And of course, reference images are only as good as your ability to also take orthographic views, so to a non-animator my photos from the day looked pretty tedious and boring. We ended our tour at a wall of Chinese cat statues hooked up to a board in which people could use basic coding syntax to make them turn and wave in various patterns. It’s a great concept, but I also just really like cats.
We then went back to the university for a talk about AI and the role it plays both inside and outside of video games. I had a really good time asking questions and posing ideas to discuss, so much so that we ran out of time and I had to continue the discussions into lunch. After spending more time hanging out and having great discussions with the German students, we returned to the hotel for a brief rest before returning for game night.
I got a little work done on the current model/animation I’m working on – the bell tower from the recent Game of Thrones finale that I wanted to animate in the same style as the opening credits. We had ordered pizza, but mine was more like the contents of a sub dumped onto a cheese pizza with a couple mushrooms added in. I don’t know who eats pizza with lettuce on it, but they need to re-evaluate their life choices.
I joined some of the students in a couple games of Secret Hitler. Yes, I recognize the irony in that one. I had spent an entire summer playing that game with my friends back home, so I was pretty excited to play it again. The German students had obviously played with each other before, so it was pretty funny to see the crazy ways they would deduce who was a fascist and who was a liberal. Some turns took a very long time as they used logic to decide the best way to win; it was clear they were game developers by the way they thought things through. I just called everyone snakes the entire time.
Alex and I decided to leave the games lab to meet our friend Mike back at the hotel. We hadn’t really checked the bus schedule or looked up the way back before we were already outside and without wifi, so it was a 20-minute wait in the cold as we listened to music in a particularly empty part of town. After meeting up with Mike we headed over to a bar that he had looked up called “Black Sheep.” It was pretty empty and after we each had a drink, we realized the bar was closing. So onward we went to find another open bar, a surprisingly hard task for being in Germany. We stopped at “Globtrotters” bar and had drinks and exchanged wild abroad stories until our friends Penny and Josh joined us. I lost track of the number of drinks I had, but I remember that they were all very tasty. We didn’t want to stay out too late because we had to catch an early train in the morning, so once the bar started clearing out we also left to go back to the hotel.