Super Volatile

Mass Effect has a simple message: human beings are delusional about their importance in the grand scheme of things.

Mass Effect starts with humanity in the galaxy where it should have been in the United Federation of Planets: unnoticed among the other minor species struggling to prove to the Council why they add anything of value to the civilization that is Citadel Space. Such a message would be laughable were it made central to Star Wars or Star Trek, where nearly every important character is human. Star Wars and Star Trek start with the assumption that humans will be important in galactic civilization. Why? In part because the medium forced that decision, but more so because both universes assume that human beings add meaning to the universe. Mass Effect doesn't make such an assumption. Mass Effect never lets you forget that we might not add one jot of meaning or benefit to intelligent life beyond our solar system.

Mass Effect gets a well-deserved analysis.

Skinner and Pavlov proved that primary reinforcers are extremely powerful motivators. After sex and sleep, bacon is one of nature's most powerful primary reinforcers, partly due to its high fat and protein content in comparison to other meats. Bacon has become known as the "gateway meat": the smell triggers intense cravings, even in vegetarians. But in our modern world, our instinctual craving for bacon and other fatty foods can cause significant health problems.

An article about bacon (occasionally it also mentions games).

Skyrim was released this winter, and players have already invested millions of hours in it’s single-player Nordic countryside. World of Warcraft boasts millions of years logged on it’s massively-multiplayer world of Azeroth. The human experience would claim billions of lifetimes spent in its omni-player reality, if it were to make a comparative claim on its marketing material.

How soon until we spend not hours but entire lifetimes elsewhere?

In case you didn't notice, it's already happening. From a comment on Hacker News:

If you can plug in, feed yourself some poptarts and hydrate every 8 hours, and otherwise float in limbo being someone you love more than your real self, we're going to see entire classes of people disappear, just like my WoW friends that I'll probably never chat with again.

I was all alone, sipping faux-sugar water through a straw, out of a bar glass that faintly smelled of soap. A StarCraft II game, broadcasting live from MLG Orlando, blared in front of me, but I was still a little too groggy to understand what was happening. A couple of college students huddled in front of the projector did homework. A waitress eyed us all warily, wondering if we tipped… or bit. What had I done? What brought me this low? A crippling addiction to the sport of the future, as it turns out.

An attempt to explain to laymen what Starcraft 2 craze is about.

With Doom3 something happened. It took 4 years. I don't blame you, i blame arist's. Artists don't want 40 characters on screen, they want 10,000 polys per character. Artists don't want you to run fast, they want you to enjoy the scenery. Artists don't want slow projectiles you can dodge, they want realism. The thing with artists is that they so easily can become perfectionists and just like programmers can loose themselves in the whirlpool trying to write the optimal code long after any reasonable performance optimization is left to be made, they get stuck refining every texture pixel by pixel. The truth is that single line drawn by Picasso can (and most often is) more aesthetically pleasing then the meat-head character someone spent six months sculpting in Z-brush. By creating Mega Texture (Really cool by the way) you gave in to your artists desires.

Naive in its honesty call against games with too much visual splendor but not enough originality.

We talk to the founders of id Software to celebrate their 20th anniversary.

Video feature with John Carmack and other people from id Software, where they reflect on the history of the company.

Gamification is easy. It offers simple, repeatable approaches in which benefit, honor, and aesthetics are less important than facility. For the consultants and the startups, that means selling the same bullshit in book, workshop, platform, or API form over and over again, at limited incremental cost. It ticks a box. Social media strategy? Check. Games strategy? Check.

Why you can't just put a “game!” sticker on your boring product. Via @helen_off_troy.

Despite its decrepit economy, North Korea is believed to train an army of computer programmers and hackers. The police in Seoul said Thursday that four South Koreans and a Korean-Chinese had been arrested on charges of drawing on that army to organize a hacking squad of 30 young video gaming experts.

South Korea accuses North for making money to support the regime in such an absurd way that it sounds like a silly propaganda.

With a fully synchronous lockstep architecture! In a synchronous engine every client executes the exact same code at the exact same frame rate. Let that sink in for a moment. In an 8 player game of SupCom every player has an identical copy of the game state and follows an identical code path. Instead of transferring over per unit state information (position, health, etc) over the network only player input needs to be sent across the networks². If all players have an identical game state and process the same input then their output state should also be identical.

How games like Starcraft 2 or Supreme Commander keep up with thousands of units simultaneously in multiplayer matches.

Such decisions aren't made lightly; CCP employs two full-time economists to keep the economy running as smoothly as possible and to deal with changes such as the introduction of Aurum.

Fascinating story of the clash between virtual and real-world economics in EVE Online. Despite having fewer users than World of Warcraft (300k vs. 12 million), EVE seems to have created much more sophisticated virtual society.