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:
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
Why Batman Can't Kill
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Borderlands Series
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
Artless in Alderaan
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.