Inspector Cyndi Insider

Filming Inspector Cyndi in Newport

Before filming began, Earle and John scouted out locations around Newport. We had to find places that not only looked correct for the 1890's, but also were accessible to filming.

We got chased out of the Newport Reading Room (which really is a place for men to play cards and such.) Guess they never got over that incident with the horse in the card room back in the 1890's.

The fine folks at Astor's Beechwood Mansion, on the other hand, were most gracious and helpful. We strongly recommend you visit there.

Earle did the filming. Eleanor directed. And our own Cyndi did the acting. John did most of the post-production editing.

Filming taught us several things: background sounds are hard to avoid; beware windy days; gravel hurts knees; and you always want to go back and re-shoot. We all have a lot more respect for film makers now.

Coming up with the Stories

For a crew that has an estimated 7,000 books, has played Dungeons and Dragons together for years, and includes a published author, coming up with stories is no problema.

The Irish Spies story actually happened, but in New Jersey. An incident with a monkey hurling light bulbs at wealthy dinner party guests also happened. Ft. Adams is as described (thanks for the fine tour, Ft. Adams folks.) David got the idea for Death Nell from a comic book. Marcia taught us about Toy Symphonies. And Cyndi knew very well the characters populating our story set in the Truro Synagogue. We included our cats, moms, dads, and other relatives in many of the games.

Who really helped was Bertram Lippincott, the librarian at the Newport Historical Society. He pointed us at exactly the right materials to get entertaining bits about the place and times. Thanks, Bert!

The Question and Answer Model

This is the techie part. The Inspector Cyndi in Newport games rely on an interesting bit of software we developed, called the Q and A Model. It's a way of organizing questions such that your asking a question may turn on another question or turn off another question.

So, you will never know to ask the Pursor about the First Mate unless first you ask Mrs. Stately if anything untowards happened on the Plymouth.

Also, this lets us make Mr. Worthington, for example, get increasingly testy if you return to him too often. He might even stop answering. (Oops, now you have two extra clues!)

We plan to use our Q and A Model in future games.

Accessibility is not Easy

Ray Kurzweil invented the Reading Machine for the Blind. Stevie Wonder has one. One day one of Stevie's folks called Ray's company to say that the Reading Machine was talking about "pirates". But Stevie wasn't reading about pirates. Turns out that the programmers had included a game in the Reading Machine. Stevie had inadvertantly started that game. One of our crew worked there. That's where we got the idea for computer games for people who are blind or have other special needs.

Easier said than done. Audio user interfaces have very different needs than Graphical user interfaces. Context and consistency are most important. Never let the player get lost. Bandwidth is important. Speech takes longer than reading.

Graphics entertain sighted people. Folks who are blind like to hear different voices for different characters. They like entertaining background noises (Note that each home has a different cat, different clocks, and different servant bells.)

People who rely on voice controls expect to speak the word printed on a button, not the hot key number next to it.

Deaf children may have smaller vocabularies than people who have been able to pick up words by overhearing others talk.

And the Web site, purchasing, electronic downloading or delivery on CD, and installation all need to be made accessible.

Oh, and getting our stuff to work with multiple versions of screen readers, magnifiers, voice control software, or Windows itself, arggh!

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