While I will be out and about, enjoying the activities on offer, sadly I won’t be performing or speaking at any events this year. I do have a few projects on the boil, though, and I promise to update here more often; I have six unfinished draft articles lying around, all of which are now badly dated! Watch out for something new appearing here before too long…

Despite my lack of Science Week involvement, I am putting in a public appearance this weekend.  This year Freeplay, Melbourne’s computer games festival, returns, and tomorrow at the Victorian State Library I will be moderating two of the panels: Games and Screen Culture at 10:30, and The Black Sheep at 3:30. Both aim to offer different perspectives on how games function in the larger and more traditional culture of  film and television. Freeplay continues on Saturday, and if you have any interest in computer games beyond just playing them, I encourage you to check it out!

While the week may be over (and it’s a decimal week – 10 days long!), though, there are still events to come! Tomorrow night Simon Pampena brings the Maths Olympics back home to Melbourne for the end of his triumphant national tour, 7:30 at Eurotrash Bar in the city. I’ll be there, and I’d advise you not to miss it either!

Oh, and I should also assure all my readers that I weathered Daffodil Day without incident.

Well…almost. I did have a bit of a freak out when I suddenly noticed this…

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But perhaps the two most exciting people I talked to were Simon Pampena, of The Angry Mathematician and the Maths Olympics fame, and Rob Morrison, one of the two presenters of Australia’s best-loved science show, The Curiosity Show. Here’s a photo of the three of us:

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Rob has so many fascinating things to say that I hope I can bring you the full interview, but a couple of his ideas really struck home with me. He believes that we don’t have to get children interested in science; rather all children are interested in science, but are turned off it by bad teaching, a lack of exposure, or peer pressure. He pointed to popular media as the prime example: every newspaper has a devoted Sports section, a devoted Arts section, and is full of news on politics; a person’s interests in such things are constantly reinforced, and on television too. But someone interested in science is lucky if their newspaper has a devoted science journalist, let alone a separate science section. Even if there is – and most are weekly, if they exist at all – it’s generally lumped in with and dominated by Technology, which is not the same thing at all. So his role was to be some guy on television saying “hey, it’s cool to be into science, I’m into it too”.

I suggested Rob and his cohort Deane were rock stars of science, but he rejected that idea. It wasn’t the personalities on the screen that mattered, he said, it was what they were doing. Kids would often come up to him, not caring if he was Rob or Deane, to complain that the demonstration they’d seen on the show didn’t work when they’d tried it at home. It was the ideas and science that they remembered, and which fascinated them. Even today, if you mention The Curiosity Show to someone, they won’t remember the presenters but their favourite bit of science – and it’s often a surprisingly strong memory. Everyone has this passion for science, the curiosity and desire for discovery and learning, if only they let themselves show it.

Simon Pampena is certainly a guy who wears this passion on his sleeve, and he’s someone I could listen to endlessly. He wasn’t sure I was serious when I asked him to tell me the subject of his honours thesis on camera, but listening to him explain the Banach-Tarski paradox was one of the greatest moments in my career as an interviewer. His show, the Maths Olympics, is in your face and serious about maths. His excerpt at the launch had everything: music, war cries, national pride, the first x digits of Pi… Go see The Maths Olympics when he comes back to Melbourne on August 26. I know I will. (Incidentally, Simon had the kind of strong Curiosity Show memory I mentioned above, about a demonstration involving scrimshaw.)

Of course I have a few events of my own during Science Week; here’s a quick reminder:

• – my new comedy science lecture at the Royal Society of Victoria, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of that great unread classic of popular science literature: Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It’s on the last few days of Science Week – Friday, August 22 is a special matinee, free for schools, and there are two evening performances on the 23rd and 24th. The Historic Theatre is a beautiful venue, but not very big, so be sure to book! Details are .
• Not the Nobel Prize – Melbourne Museum’s comedy panel show returns for a third year! See me and three other comedians – Courteney Hocking, Sam Simmons and Charlie Pickering – try and sort fact from fiction in the stories presented by four actual, qualified scientists! This usually sells out, so make sure you book your tickets! Details are here.

Also during Science Week, but not part of it, are a few other projects of mine:

• The Anarchist Guild Social Committee meeting #3 – Melbourne’s newest comedy sensation, a live sketch comedy show at the Bella Union, Trades Hall, on the third Sunday of every month. It features yours truly as a writer and performer, and always fills to capacity. Details here.
• Set List preview season – an all-new improvised music comedy show premiering at Fringe, but you can catch an early preview at The Butterfly Club from August 21 to 24. I’ll be performing in the first show on Thursday, August 21. Details here.
• Impro Sundae – top-notch improvised comedy with The Crew, second and fourth Sunday every month, also at the Bella Union. Details here.

Once you get past the lovely prose and gorgeous painted visuals (by David Hellman of one of my favourite web comics, A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible) you quickly discover that this game is like an art-rock version of Super Mario Bros. You jump from platform to platform in a series of “Worlds”, jumping on the heads of diminutive enemies (who resemble Grug more than anything else), and trying to collect the pieces of puzzles which illustrate the game’s backstory.

The rewind feature is simple – you hold down a button and can reverse (or speed up) the time that passed before you pressed the button. This makes it one of those rare games where it is impossible to “die”, thus placing Braid in the company of my favourite game of all time, Ron Gilbert’s The Secret of Monkey Island. If you do do something fatal – fall into flames or spikes (or both at once) or touch an enemy – the game pauses so you can press the button and rewind. This “invincibility” shifts the focus firmly on to puzzle solving and lets the player feel free to try dangerous things, safe in the knowledge that they won’t have to start again from scratch. Blow reckoned it broke the platform game rule to not ask a player to make a “leap of faith”, and indeed one of the earliest levels is titled “Leap of Faith” and requires exactly that.

The only thing that stays in the present moment when you rewind is the consciousness of the player (and, it’s implied, that of the protagonist character, Tim). Time is fluid only in the sense that you can travel mentally back to an earlier physical state of the game universe and make different decisions. This changes as the game progresses, however, as some objects – which sport an inviting green glow – are unaffected by your time manipulation, so you can pick up a key from the bottom of a pit and then rewind your jump back up to the top, the glowing green key travelling with you. I believe there are other variations as you continue as well, though as yet I haven’t progressed past World 2.

Time travel in fiction is usually presented badly, and in games the causality is even worse (from a metaphysical point of view – it might not make a lot of strictly logical sense, but Day of the Tentacle is still great fun when controlling characters in different time zones). In physics terms, time travel allows you to break outside of the light cone effect that constrains real world causality – it lets us affect events which could not normally be reached by the speed of light from our current place in spacetime, and that has such huge implications that few people consider how it might actually work, instead preferring the usual sci fi “wisdom” that history “takes time to change” (which, again, is often great from an entertainment point of view – I love Back to the Future, even though logically its nonsense). So to make a game involving “time travel” that fully engages me without destroying my suspension of disbelief…well, it impressed me.

Braid keeps things simple – it’s more like using a DVD player than a TARDIS – and uses magic to explain the time shenanigans. It’s delightful and fun and beautiful – and, as y girlfriend pointed out, Tim dresses a bit like me and has red hair. Check it out!