So I was skimming through Microsoft’s CES ’09 keynote (which can be viewed online here) when I came across a pretty interesting part. They were showing off some games on Xbox Live (if I’m not wrong) and I was pretty impressed by their gameshow game “1 vs 100″ where a hundred people can play together on Xbox Live. But that’s a story for another time.
After that demo, they began talking about another game called Kodu, and they brought a 12-year-old girl named Sparrow up on stage to help demo the game. At first I was mildly amused that she was called Sparrow, but that’s when I was greeted with this:
Honestly? “ACTUAL 12-YEAR-OLD GIRL”. It seemed that Microsoft was trying REALLY hard to convince us she was ACTUALLY REAL. You know, just in case we thought she was a robot or cyborg or something like that. Or maybe we’d think she’s a guy? Or that she wasn’t 12-years-old?
Or maybe we’d think she was a bird?
Jokes aside though, the game is pretty interesting, it’s more of a game creator for kids, teaching them the fundamentals behind programming. For example Sparrow showed us how she could build a factory, and tell it to create a Wisp after 10 seconds, and then close after 11 seconds. The level of customisation available to the player looks pretty deep as well, with the presenter going “I’m glad you’re the one who’s doing this”, because of the way she navigated through the many, many radial menus, it’s clear this “programming language” takes some time to learn.
For now though, we’ll have to settle for an ACTUAL 12-YEAR-OLD GIRL to show us what the game is like.
