Tag: games

On the gaming front

Spacebunny gave me Battlefield 3 and a PS/3 for Christmas, which was awesome. And speaking as a Level 70 COD:MW2 PC player, I have to say that B3 on the PS/3 really rocks. The giant maps are so much more interesting and the teamplay design is much better than in COD, although I’m disappointed that the Commander mode was omitted. There also appear to be fewer cheats and so forth in evidence; certainly the kill stats are far less lopsided.

I was tracking an enemy tank about 250 meters away and tagged the driver when he exited, then managed to suppress a pair of snipers in a building 300 meters off long enough to permit a teammate they were pinning down to make his escape. I picked off one sniper, then thought I was finished when someone rushed into the building I was in. But it was just a support guy on my team who’d noticed my position and was dropping off extra ammo. So, I reloaded, waited a little longer, then nailed the second sniper. I’m only level three and my twitch reflexes are long gone, but I try to pull my own weight.

Now I have to figure out how to drive and pilot vehicles without crashing them….

Gamers > Scientists

Many people have sent me this link about gamers doing scientists’ work for them, so I figured I better post it just to end the incoming barrage. But it’s hardly any surprise to anyone who has read TIA and been able to compare the intellectual difference between a minor game industry figure and a world-famous scientist.

Gamers have solved the structure of a retrovirus enzyme whose configuration had stumped scientists for more than a decade. The gamers achieved their discovery by playing Foldit, an online game that allows players to collaborate and compete in predicting the structure of protein molecules.

After scientists repeatedly failed to piece together the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus, they called in the Foldit players. The scientists challenged the gamers to produce an accurate model of the enzyme. They did it in only three weeks.

Ten years versus three weeks. Yeah, that sounds about right. In truth, there are few groups more different than gamers and scientists, especially if you’re talking about the most elite group of gamers known as the game designers. (There is no such thing as a game designer who isn’t a gamer, although it would surprise you how many other people in the game industry don’t play anything. There are unfortunately an awful lot of John Sculleys in the industry these days.) The major difference is not that game designers are smarter and wealthier than scientists, although that’s also true, but that game designers could not possibly care less about academic credentials whereas few scientists appear to care much about anything else, unless it is attaching their name to something someone else intends to publish in an scientific journal.

I once had a European head-hunter ask me how I could possibly have gone into game development when I didn’t have a degree in it… never mind that there weren’t any degrees or courses in it at the time and I still, to this day, have never met a single person in the industry who formally studied game design or development in college. More than a few of the most successful guys in the industry dropped out of college if they ever even went; not dropping out during my sophmore year to focus on selling my 16-channel, 44 KHz, stereo sound board is one of my few big regrets now.

By the way, I’m presently working with Markku on a new game design which is based on the boundless evil of cats and may be the first mobile game inspired by a Tanith Lee short story. I don’t know when we’ll have the first alpha available, but if you’re interested in being a tester and you’ve got an Android device, let me know.

You know, I always liked her

But after seeing this, I have to say that if it weren’t for SB, I’d be forced to conclude Mila Kunis is, in fact, the Platonic ideal of woman:


Lots of women pretend to like games and sports since it’s an easy and intelligent way of winning favor with men. But it’s never hard to tell who is serious and who isn’t. It is interesting how your guild gets to know you over time without having to meet you. My old guild used to refer to me as Shakespeare after the incident when I happened to offer a some appropriate commentary concerning the amusingly panicked flight of a gnome from an Ursan village.

The dream prison

To be honest, I can think of worse fates:

As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells. Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

Brutal workouts during the day followed by playing games all night… throw in some alcohol and three hours at a downtown night club on the weekends and that pretty much describes my twenties.

The game’s the thing

REGINA/REGINA (2314-A788899-A) 201-1105
Last night a series of explosions ripped through Vehicle Assembly Building No. 3 of the General Shipyards facility on Pixie. Both company and military investigators on the scene report that the damage was almost certainly the work of
saboteurs. General Shipyard’s Vehicle Assembly Building No. 3 housed the main assembly line for the production of L-Hyd drop tanks….

Imperial Navy Commander Lobeck hault-Donesev, the naval system liaison officer on the L-Hyd project, announced that Naval Counter-Intelligence was exploring the possibility that the sabotage was the work of Ine Givar terrorists. Ine Givar activity in the Regina subsector has thus far been limited to scattered and ineffective strikes on Efate and Feri, but this incident “definitely bore their signature,” he explained. 

General Shipyard’s press secretary Harcord Haveln, however, discounted any political motives for the sabotage.“There are commercial concerns in the subsector that place their own self-interest above that of the population as a whole,” he said. When pressed for an explanation, he refused to elaborate.

The public affairs officer of the Pixie office for Naval Counter- Intelligence refused an interview later in the day but issued a press release disavowing any responsibility for the remarks of Commander hault-Donesev and stating unequivocally that NCI had no evidence whatsoever of Ine Givar activity on Efate, Feri, or Forboldn.

The module for Fifth Frontier War version 1.0 is now available for download from the VASSAL library.

At the Black Gate

Now, I recognize that this is an announcement that will appeal to approximately 12 people on the planet. But, since one of them is me and another one is our well-loved Publisher and Editor, that makes this announcement of particular relevance for this blog. As I mentioned some time ago, one of my less obtainable objectives in life has been to actually play a certain space wargame that is virtually unplayable by anyone who happens to either lack a large quantity of floor and/or table space that can be left safely unmolested for weeks or has what passes for a reasonable modicum of a life. The problem with monster wargames, you see, is that they combine all the worst qualities of gaming in one intimidating product. Not only are they far more complicated than the average wargame, thus significantly reducing the number of potential opponents, but they take an incredibly long time simply to set up, never mind play. As an added bonus, the large quantity of constituent components usually means that they are more expensive than the norm, but they make up for being more expensive by being less graphically elaborate than most games because no game publisher in his right mind is going to go to the risk of printing what is usually something between a labor of love and a labor of lunacy on the part of a detail-oriented monomaniac.

Read the rest if you are among the few, the proud, the well-travelled.

The beauty handicap

Feminism makes pretty women less employable:

Researchers at two Israeli universities started their study by first asking an eight-member panel to scroll through a series of photos and separate the lookers from the merely OK-looking. That was designed to create some level of group consensus on who qualified as attractive versus not (the researchers had already vetted the pool of photos to eliminate as much as possible photos of candidates whose ethnicity could be easily identified.)

Then the researchers sent off 5,312 resumes in pairs of two to advertised job listings. The resumes themselves were nearly identical, but one resume did not include a photo at all, and the other resume in the pair contained a photo of either an attractive male/female candidate, or a plain-looking male/female candidate.

The overall positive-response rate was 14.5 percent. The resumes that got the highest callbacks from the hiring folks were:

• Resumes for attractive men (photo included): These had a response rate that was 45 percent higher than for plain-looking men whose photo was included, and double the call-back rate for male resumes that were sent without a photo.

• Resumes for women with no picture: These had a response rate that was 30 percent higher than for attractive women whose photo was attached to the resume, and 22 percent higher than “plain” women whose photo was attached.

The reason, it turns out, is that 96 percent of the firms had “a female employee between the ages of 23-34 doing the screening”. And women don’t like pretty women or ugly men. So, if you’re looking for a job, it would probably be a good idea to include your picture if you’re a dashing man but leave it off if you’re a woman.

Ender’s Game

I am increasingly beginning to feel like Leopold Mozart. After a spate of ASL games, Ender decided to design some game rules for his little football men. These are the NFL teams used the old electric vibrating football game; I used to break the flat bottoms off and play with them in the carpet when I was a kid. I didn’t do anything particularly fancy with them, I would just line them up and run little plays, then record the “results” in a notebook. Of course, I created a whole fantasy league with teams in places like Norfolk; both Minneapolis and St. Paul had their own teams.

Ender takes a much more systematic approach than I did. He doesn’t break off the stands nor invent his own franchises, but instead got his mother to make him a paperboard football field for which he makes paper logos that go in the middle of the field for the designated home team. Then he wrote up 10 double-sided pages of rules in which the offensive play call and the defensive call combine to create a modifier that is applied to dice roll on the play result table for the appropriate formation. It’s essentially Maddens meets ASL, or more to the point, a simplified version of Avalon Hills 1959 Football Strategy, but it’s surprisingly entertaining and produces pretty reasonable results despite the fact that absolutely no statistical analysis went into the formation result tables.

My one suggestion was to add a dynamic element via special rolls. “Heat of Battle”-style rolls triggered by net results below 2 or above 12 provide for fumbles and interceptions versus big gains and touchdowns, and blitzes against passes give either a -2 (1-2) for the defense or +3 (3-6) for the offense. Those elements backfired on me last night as I fumbled twice inside his 30-yard line.

It’s bad enough to have been surpassed on the literary side. But playing this last night, I suddenly had the alarming impression that it would make for a pretty good Facebook/Android game.

Crash and burn coming

If Zynga stock was public, I’d short it:

Since launching its first Internet game in 2007, Zynga has grown rapidly. The company’s true earnings are unknown to outsiders, but industry observers estimate that its annual revenue could now be $500 million or more. In May, social-media analyst Lou Kerner estimated Zynga’s total price tag at $4 billion, based on corporate filings for a stock issuance.

In light of Zynga’s phenomenal rise, one former senior employee recalls arriving at the company eager to discover what new business practices were driving its success in a market where other popular Web 2.0 ventures struggled to make money. What was Zynga’s secret? Not long after starting work, he got an answer. It came directly from Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus at a meeting. And it wasn’t what he expected.

“I don’t fucking want innovation,” the ex-employee recalls Pincus saying. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.”

There’s a company like this every generation or two in the game industry. Back in the day, the self-styled “assholes with the money” were GT Interactive. Everyone, especially the people at GT, thought they were going to dominate the industry, but they didn’t even last as long as Origin Systems, much less Electronic Arts. While you can make a lot of money in the short term with a pure copy-and-churn-it-out approach, it never translates into success in the medium term. Once you grow to a certain point, you have to figure out how to make something that people want to play on your own, and that’s not something a group of employees accustomed to operating on an evil and short-sighted ethos are ever able to do.

But speaking of games, happy 25th birthday, Jumpman!