Nerd. It is a term that has been diluted by inappropriate self-declaration. The most non-nerdy people will gleefully proclaim, “Oh, I’m such a nerd!” if they, say, can give you a recap on the series arc of LOST or if they used to watch Buffy The Vampire-Slayer for a season back in the 90s.

Those are not nerds. Witness above. That is the awesome power and majesty of nerd-kind. Obsessive dedication and  technical skill to turn a mundane series of actions (rolling dice, moving game counters) into an endlessly complex mixed-media, touch and materials-sense-based system. And why?

Because, DUDE! Check that out! AHH-haww-haaaaaau-some.

Now, to the uninitiated, the banter being thrown back and forth makes little sense. And the action seems boring and needlessly complex. Well, yes. But welcome to Dungeons and Dragons. They’ve re-created all those awful elements present in the actual, paper-and-dice version, but added thousands and thousands of lines of code working across multiple, bleeding edge technologies to do so.

But here’s the thing: That’s where innovation comes from. From socially awkward, brilliant people who do amazingly complicated, labor-intensive stuff to see if it is possible to do it. Because it would be “cool” to their group of similarly minded friends.

I am totally one of those similarly minded friends. I see this, even in its development stage, and all that is within me yells, “WANT!”

But because I, too, am of the Nerd-persuasion, my reaction is both immediate  love of something coupled by an equally immediate series of nitpicking criticisms all the way down to challenging the conceptual level and fundamental premise of the enterprise. That is what actual nerds do to (and for!) one another.

Here are some (but not all) of the things that came to mind when I saw this. (Below the fold, after the “more” link are some thoughts that really need not be read by anyone who isn’t of a similar interest base):

The problems and oddnesses of this application as it is in development are almost too many to list. The use of physical character models seems problematic.

On the one hand, THAT’S THE ENTIRE POINT, right? To mix the familiar figure-based gameplay with touch/sensing aspect to interact with the virtual surface of the table. But if the monsters are all virtual and “touchable,” then having the characters represented by physical models is just gimmicky and needless.

I can see the trade-off in theory;  you’ve got a limited set of set players. You’ve got an unlimited set of monsters and beasts, keeping them virtual and controlled by the DM’s clicking. But so what? In for a penny, in for a pound.

Part of the visceral, table-based game-fun of D&D is the monster models, as much as it is the character models.  So you’ll need more. Chances are, if you’re springing for an Ultra-Table-Of-The-Future, you can probably afford a lot of monster models.

But I kinda get why you’d want CGI monsters or NPCs. Especially, like, townsfolk and such. If I were to give initial feature-notes, I’d want the option to use monster/NPC models  (NPC stands for “non-player character” for those of you who did not heed my warning above the fold and continued to read) and switch between virtual as my physical store of figurines dictated.

Also, as presented, the virtual die is slow and weird and unlikable; why make a virtual die on a touch-and-position-sensitive board that can capture data from a real polyhedron? Having it introduce itself by coming in from heaven each time seems cool the first three times you see it. But after that, it becomes like those hyper-animated summoning spell-preambles in the FINAL FANTASY games. Your jaw is on the floor the first time you use it. Soon afterwards, however, you hate having to cast the spell because you’ve got enough time to go get a soda and contemplate just how much time you’ve wasted in your life with these kinds of games by the time the animation is through.

But it, too, like the monster  issue (maybe even moreso, since who doesn’t have a set dice at a D&D game?) makes the experience less like a melding of the physical, tangibleness of traditional table-top gaming with the expandability of scenarios and backgrounds of a holodeck and more like a wii game with an awkward interface across a 2D surface.

I mean, that’s really what we’re talking here, in this application: a holodeck for your D&D game. The question then becomes, what actual, physical objects are key components and what are OK to present as simulation?

The idea of easily, instant, Sega SHINING FORCE style (hey. I said this was a nerds-only area, didn’t I? What are the rest of you still doing here) movement ranges, with adjustments on the fly for terrain type and encumbrance are not only great and cool– they also save time and add fun. So too for durations of spells, areas of effect, tracking of modified conditions (blindness, spell-effects, protections, curses, whatever). That’s awesome. You have the fun and social aspect of a gaming group (cue John Bender: “demented and sad, but social.”) and the immediacy and number-crunching background work of a video-game.

But turning the dice and the monsters into parts of the holodeck miss the point of what we’re bringing in to the deck in the first place. We’re not just the character avatars; we’re the players around the table, too, with the gear. The DM’s gear includes the monster models; the player’s gear include dice.

As it stands, it looks like the least-fun game of D&D ever. Friggin’ nerds.

Obviously, this application is just in a college, REAL-GENIUS-style level of development and probably will never see the light of day. (Then again,  neither do most of the people for whom the application would be cool.) But still. The notion of mixing tangible, touch-based counters with an interactive, virtual board is cool. And it has merit across a bunch of other fields. Business and strategy planning,  task management; anything that sees people meeting in a room around a table today can have some kind of benefit from this technology.

And while D&D is not a “needed” app, it is both a very complex and desired one, and presents a set of interface and design challenges for the technology that could provide lessons for other, more “useful” apps.

But as much as I shake my fist at my fellow, much-more-capable-than-I nerd for going so far into a project with so many flawed givens…I kinda love that this is the first, go-to thing that kids from CMU spend their time coding. I kinda love these guys.

When I was a little kid and my mom sold the first business-level “word processors,” which came with, I shit you not, 9 inch floppy disks that held 16K  or 32K worth of data, one of the very, very first “program disks” available was a set of games. HUNT THE WUMPUS, the ASCII-based STAR TREK game, Hammurabi, Rogue, stuff like that.

It is cool to me that all of these technologies and new, incredibly complicated things that end up driving business and changing the face of the world begin with a bunch of nerds, looking to make D&D and Star Trek based games with.