Made out of people

danyelf_at_microsoft.com

"I've killed you!," I said. "Shot you in the head, I think."
"Well, did you go to jail?"
"Yeah, I did."
"I designed that feature. Pretty much everyone kills me."

I was sitting next to George Juntiff, and it was Microsoft's New Employee Orientation. We were on our first break: Tim had tried hard to keep up our enthusiasm for the variety of different dental plans, and what their implications for SSDPs are¹, but now we were free to talk amongst each other.

Currently my neighbor at NEO, George had been in the military until recently. He'd been on active duty in Thailand, Bosnia, and several other sites until he decided to go back to school. He trained up in modeling and simulation -- and got tapped to work on a game. He was the military lead for "America's Army," coordinating the team of contractors who would convert the "Unreal" engine over to AA and keeping them honest to military standards and training.

In the beginning of the game, a sergeant leads you around and trains the character who is playing, barking orders and pointing. Juntiff took the cameo and voiced that sergeant. He insults you if you don't keep up, he yells at you if your aim is off.

And, when they watched players, they saw that pretty much everyone takes a potshot at some point or another. Just to see what happens. (They go to jail, a sparsely-decorated room where they can't do much. I don't know how long it lasts.)

America's Army is now available for free download; Juntiff has coordinated massive promotional campaigns, and now is moving on to something else. In this case, it's an operational role somewhere in the depths of the Microsoft software release systems.

--

Three days later, I was set with temporary housing, a temporary car, and a permanent badge & office. I had a computer, a phone, a bus pass, and an email account. In other words, I was in place and a real employee.

That was Thursday. On Friday, I flew off to Chicago for CSCW. My trip to Tanzania was actually timed around this conference: I was co-running a workshop on the applications of social networks to computer-supported collaborative work, and so needed to get back in time to attend the conference.

Today is a day off. I'm split between "see Chicago sights" and "take a really long nap" as my major activities for the day. I was scheduled to see an old friend from undergrad for lunch, but he had to bail on me.

[1] "SSDP" is definitely my Acronym of the Day. Stands for "Same Sex Dependant Couple."