T w e n t y S i d e d
The new Silent Hill, now with more of… whatever it is the marketing guys say games should be doing this year.
Stolen Pixels #45:
STUDY: Violent Video Games Turn Teens Into Fat, Weakling Killing Machines
A new study released by the Institute for Responsible Entertainment revealed today that today’s “hyper violent” video games cause teens to spend hours in a limp, slack-jawed state of simulated mayhem.
Dr. Colin Jenkins, who performed the study said, “It is truly alarming… these kids spend hours playing what amounts to a murder simulator, while at the same time getting less exercise than someone who is asleep. This means the kids will have an amazing propensity for violence, and be in abysmal physical condition. This is dangerous for the kids, and mildly dangerous for the people they might someday try to harm.”
One of the test subjects, a 15 year-old Danny Larson, demonstrated one of the games in question. The game, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, shows Danny’s character robbing an old woman using a baseball bat. When asked about the game’s violent content, Danny’s father replied, “A baseball bat? Hell. I can’t imagine him leaving the house, much less using sports equipment.”
All of the test subjects showed signs of too little exercise, being either scrawny or overweight. Dr. Jenkins, summing up his findings said, “These kids could be a real threat to society if they ever got off their asses and did anything.”
George Lucas in Love
This has been linked to hell and back, but maybe you’ve managed to miss it up until now.
Link (YouTube) |
Also along these lines: My own take on what Star Wars would be like if it was written today.
Stolen Pixels #44: Onward and Upward
In World of Goo, incompetence kills. Actually, competence kills too, just slightly less.
Sessler’s Soapbox: Innovation Vs. Numeration
Adam Sessler of G4TV has a regular video op-ed titled “Sessler’s Soapbox”. He’s a reviewer who is obliged to give numeric scores to games, and here he clearly comes out against them.
G4TV.com
But what really caught my attention was the part at the beginning where he talks about the difficulty of a game and how it does (or doesn’t) figure in to a review score. This is one of those subjects that calls for a thousand words or none, and I don’t have time for a thousand words. The best I can manage right now is to gesture wildly in Adam’s direction and say, “What he has said is significant.”
Sierpinski Triangle
When I was about 15 years old, I ran into the following set of directions:
- Take a piece of paper.
- Mark 3 dots on it. They can be anywhere, but for aesthetic reasons it is common to pick three points that will form an equilateral triangle. Number these points 1 through 3.
- Get yourself a 3-sided die. (Or use a d6 and divide by 2.)
- Begin at one of the corners. This is your “current” position. Roll your d3, to select one of the points. Measure the distance between your current position and the chosen corner and put a dot at the exact halfway point between the two. This is your new current position.
- Sit there for a few hours or days repeating step #4: (Your current position moves, pick a corner, move halfway from where you are to the chosen corner, and make a dot, etc.) For best results, use a good ruler and a nice sharp writing instrument.
When I heard this at 15, I expected that what you would end up with is a mass of dots in the middle of the paper, dense in the middle and thinning out towards the edges. This is not what you get at all. In fact, as long as you follow the directions you will never ever place a dot anywhere near the middle of that triangle. What you actually end up with is a Sierpinski Triangle:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Sierpinski Triangle”
GameScience Dice
Here is a video (broken into two parts) from GameScience, where one Colonel Louis Zocchi makes the case that standard gaming dice are not very accurate (that is, not very random) and that his dice (this is part of a sales pitch, mind you) will perform better during play.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “GameScience Dice”
From The Archives:
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
The Gameplay is the Story
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Good to be the King?
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?