Release

Roll Eyes.
Bite lip.
Shake head.
Purse lips.
Smile.
Walk away.
Walk to the bathroom stall, first slowly, then faster and faster.
Run as if the bathroom is your savior, your only friend.
Open Stall Door. Slam.
Cry.
Release.
Let the hot tears fight their way out, their fire burning their mark on your face, letting you know they were there.
Letting you know they had been trapped inside of you.
Letting you know they deserved to be felt.
Let the quenched scream escape, declare itself to the world.
Declare that you deserve to be heard.
You deserve to feel.
You deserve.
You.

The Origin of the Pokémon Phenomenon

videogametriviaBack in 1990, few people knew Game Freak. Started in 1982 by Satoshi Tajiri as a video game tip magazine, in 1989 they released their first video game. Called Quinty in Japan, it was for the NES and did well enough that it was brought to the US under the name Mendel Palace.1 Thinking about what game to make next, Tajiri saw Nintendo’s Game Boy and the Link Cable accessory that allowed two people to connect and play together. He envisioned a game in which you could collect creatures and trade them with your friends. He brought a pitch for this game, then called Capsule Monsters, to Nintendo in the fall of 1990. They approved it and agreed to finance development, starting on a half-decade long journey.2

As you’ve probably realized, Capsule Monsters eventually became Pokémon Red and Green (Blue in the US), which came out in Japan in 1996. Even today, 6 years is considered a long time for a game to be in development – for a game to be in development that long back then was very unusual.3 There were many reasons for this delay. Game Freak released 7 games in addition to Pokémon between 1990 and 1996, of which only two were for Game Boy. Their equipment wasn’t great, and they weren’t good about backing data up – sometimes they lost as much as a month’s of work in a crash.4 Game Freak was also woefully understaffed, with only four programmers, two of whom also pulled double-duty with another aspect of the game creation.5 Pokémon underwent a lot of changes during development, with the staff continually asking themselves if a particular concept was as good as it could be.6 For instance, the dual game mechanic was not in from the start – it was suggested by Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, as a way of encouraging trading and letting siblings each have something different.7 8

No one thought Pokémon would be successful at first. The Game Boy was in its sixth year of life, making it a very old console, and a last minute delay bumped the release to February, one of the worst months for video game sales. Red and Green didn’t sell incredibly well at first, unlike most video games that have most of their sales in the first couple weeks. But it kept selling. Sales increased, and a year and a half after the game came out, it made it to the top of the weekly sales charts.9 As its popularity became apparent, proposals for tie-ins and merchandise started flooding in. The Japanese Blue version – which had upgraded graphics and bug fixes, both of which were carried over to the English releases, as well as a unique set of exclusive Pokémon – was released as one of these, a cross-promotion with a magazine.10

This long development process caused problems in the future. When Nintendo decided to bring over Pokémon, it turned out that the code was so much of a mess that they couldn’t simply replace the Japanese characters with the English alphabet – much of the code had to be rewritten.11 And when Nintendo wanted to release the N64 spinoff Pokémon Stadium, which would let people battle with their Pokémon on TV, there was no documentation of the battle code, so it had to be reverse-engineered by the team at Nintendo.12 The first generation of Pokémon games was notoriously glitchy, as well. One Pokémon, Mew, which was supposed to be a secret, showed up accidentally in some Japanese copies.13 The Missingno glitch in international copies was well known enough that Nintendo Power, the official Nintendo magazine, felt obligated to address it.14

The process of taking Pokémon out of Japan was long and involved, but very interesting. At first, no one thought it would be popular in the United States. Pokémon is a role-playing game, specifically of the Eastern subgenre, which puts it in the company of series such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. These series had traditionally not done as well in the United States. However, Nintendo believed that kids around the world were similar enough that a series that was such a hit in Japan would do well in the United States as well. To overcome the potential stumbling block of the genre, Nintendo decided to bring over the entire Pokémon franchise in a coordinated fashion.15 The clever names – a key part of the appeal of Pokémon – underwent at least one revision.16

The turbulent start of Pokémon did not prevent it from being successful as time went on and its potential was realized. Pokémon today is the second best selling video game series, losing only to Mario himself. The 20th anniversary is coming up next year, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Perhaps we can all see this as a lesson for ourselves – initial struggles shouldn’t make us stop!

1 Kohler, Chris. Power-Up, page 238-239

2 http://www.glitterberri.com/pokemon-red-blue/early-concept-art/7/

3 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/ds/pokemon/0/0

4 http://www.gamefreak.co.jp/blog/dir_english/?m=200409

5 http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Staff_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_Red_and_Green

6 http://www.glitterberri.com/pokemon-red-blue/game-freak-staff-interview/fine-tuning-the-pokemon/

7 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3979/the_art_of_balance_pokmons_.php

8 http://www.glitterberri.com/pokemon-gold-silver/pokemon-2/

9 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/ds/pokemon/0/0

10 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/ds/pokemon/0/1

11 Kohler, Chris. Power-Up, page 245

12 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/ds/pokemon/0/2

13 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/ds/pokemon/0/0

14 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MissingNo.#cite_note-NP-6

15 Kohler, Chris. Power-Up, page 245

16 http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Red_and_Green_beta#Localization-specific_information

Creating Streams at Olin

Here’s a question for you: what did you learn when you sketched bugs in Parcel B with a group of your classmates during the first week of Design Nature? I’d venture to guess that your drawing skills didn’t improve much, you didn’t learn anything particularly earth-shattering about bugs, and you didn’t develop a better understanding of how to build a biomimetic hopping toy. So why was the assignment important?

Less than a week into the design curriculum at Olin, you were exposed to the idea that design doesn’t happen in isolation; it takes into account both context and society. You can’t just sit in your design studio building Solidworks models; you have to interact with the outside world. That’s the contextual part – design interacts with, depends on, and is inspired by the real world. You’re also required to work with your peers. That’s the social part – design isn’t individual; it depends on collaboration and communication even within an individual project.

A year and a half later, UOCD spirals back to the idea that design doesn’t happen in isolation. This time you spend the entire semester interfacing with a group of people to understand them and how to design to help them. You’re studying a different part of the design process than you did in Design Nature, but what you’re doing is still rooted in the idea that design can’t happen solely in the studio.

The way design works at Olin is starkly different from the way a traditional engineering education is structured. Ben Linder uses the word “layers” to describe the traditional curricular approach: students start by taking a math class, layer a physics class on top of that knowledge, and then eventually have the opportunity to take an engineering design class. He uses the word “stream” to describe what happens in Olin’s design curriculum: students take several classes about design, and each subsequent one builds on a set of core ideas.

Ben feels that a layer curriculum focuses on credentials and on authority. In that kind of environment, students are treated like they are unqualified until they complete the last layer, meaning students often don’t identify as engineers until graduation. By contrast, a stream curriculum makes each student a “professional engineer from day one,” which University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) refers to as ‘The Olin Effect.’ You come into the design stream an engineer, you are appreciated and respected throughout the curriculum, and you leave an engineer with more experience.

Ben says it’s “much healthier to engage a subject at an intermediate level over a long period of time than to have an intense introduction that ends early.” He thinks that streams might be a better model for the way people learn: we probably don’t build knowledge in layers; instead, we fit new pieces of information into the framework of what we already know, drawing as many connections between concepts as we can (if you’re curious about this, check out Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Constructivism). If you’re learning math, physics, and design at the same time in the same course, you can’t help but draw connections between them, but if you take math and physics during your first year and design during your fourth, it might be difficult to see how they relate.

Ben also believes that a stream curriculum facilitates a culture of feedback – in his words, “if you think experienced people know what’s best, you don’t ask students for feedback, but if [students] have standing, then you can take advantage of the most obvious fact… there is no other group of people who know the experience better than the students who are currently having the experience.”

Most engineering schools don’t cover much design, especially beyond engineering design, which left Olin no choice other than to experiment with how to teach it. By contrast, analysis is traditionally a big part of engineering education, so there’s a well-established, content-driven process for teaching it. Just look at the course titles – any engineering educator knows what you mean when you say you’re taking “Dynamics” or “Differential Equations”. The established way might not be the best way, though: Mark Somerville thinks a stream model could benefit the analysis curriculum as well.

Mark and other faculty members have been thinking about analysis education at Olin. Mark observes that students tend to graduate with more confidence in their design skills than in their analysis skills. He attributes that outcome in part to the the design stream, which he views as one of Olin’s real successes – it’s a “set of experiences students have over the course of four years that explicitly relate to each other, enabling them to build a set of capacities”. He thinks there might be a way to do something similar with a different set of courses.

They hope to run an experiment next year which allows first-years to opt into a 16 credit pilot version of an analysis stream (8 in the spring, 8 the following fall) to replace Linearity I and II, the physics foundation course, and either Dynamics or Signals and Systems. Ideally, the analysis stream might extend beyond two semesters, but a two-semester pilot makes sense both because it doesn’t interfere with too much of the curriculum and because an experiment with a one-year duration can run a complete cycle every year.

Our goal is to start a conversation about what continuing to explore the concept of streams would do to the way we think about Olin’s curricular experience. Streams might not need to be academic: imagine if you took Engineering for Humanity, Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship, and rounded if off with involvement in SERV. Could that be considered a “service stream”? What streams do you think already exist, even if we haven’t thought of them that way? How would the curriculum change if every course was part of a stream?

Farewell Senior Editors

In two short weeks, the Class of 2015 will be graduating, leaving Olin to join the real world. This means that we will be saying goodbye to basically our entire editorial staff. So before they head off into the world, I would like to take a moment to thank them for their work, and to wish them well in their endeavors.

Thank you to Julianne Jorgensen, Morgan Bassford, and Allie Duncan for looking over the paper before it was published and catching our little mistakes.

Thank you to all of our contributors; your articles and insights will be missed. Special thanks to Elizabeth Mahon for the Video Game Trivia column.

Thank you to Kai Austin for editing, layout, Not XKCD, and maintaining the website.

Finally, thank you so very much to our wonderful Editor in Chief, Lyra Silverwolf, for seeing the paper through its fourth and fifth years and for joyously announcing the first weekday of every month.

I’m good at writing neither goodbye’s nor conclusions, so good luck, we will miss you, and thank you for Frankly Speaking.

Editor in Chief Announced

Frankly Speaking has been an integral part of my Olin experience, and I cannot begin to express how much I will miss it when I leave. However, as I will be graduating in less than a month, I am pleased to announce that Gigi Chow ‘18 will be taking over my role as the sole editor-in-chief next year. The paper has not only seen a fifth year of existence, but it will also fearlessly enter its sixth year in the fall under Gigi’s careful guidance and leadership.

Gigi joined Frankly Speaking with a wealth of knowledge and experience from her high school newspaper, and she has been heavily involved in all aspects of our paper since she arrived here. During her four years of high school she held the positions of photo editor and website manager, before transitioning to be a co-editor-in-chief during her senior year. I am glad to leave the paper in her capable hands.

However, Frankly Speaking can’t survive on the editor-in-chief’s passion alone. The paper isn’t possible each month without the help of our editors, writers, and contributors. Gigi needs your help to keep Frankly Speaking running!

We have several seniors who work on the paper graduating this month, including myself (EIC, 2 years), Kai Austin (editor and website manager, 3 years), and our esteemed Video Game Trivia columnist, Elizabeth Mahon (columnist, 2 years). Many thanks to them for all of their hard work!

Here’s who we need:

Editor – reads, edits articles, helps with layout. Must be able to spell and edit.

Layout editor – uses InDesign to lay out paper. Must be willing to learn InDesign.

Website manager – keeps FS’s website up to date. Kai Austin revamped the website two years ago, but he needs a successor to upload new content each month.

Copy Editor – check the first print copy of Frankly Speaking for grammatical errors, typos, and layout faux pas.

Staff Illustrator – sometimes we have these awkward spaces and they have to be filled with drawings. Can you draw things at the drop of a hat? Be staff illustrator!

Contributor – the bread-and-butter of the paper. Everyone is a contributor! Submit articles to:
submit@franklyspeakingnews.com