I’m Loving Retronaut
We did a capsule for the ace site Retronaut. There is so much great stuff there, it’s really worth a look. Here’s a gem I found there of a defunct Russian flightless-plane: The Lun-class ekranoplan
#Crysis and the Biological Singularity of Life
Another article from me on the Wellcome Trust blog:
A recent game release that has done well both critically and with fans is Crysis 2. A ‘First Person Shooter’ (FPS), the player looks through the eyes of the character they control, shooting enemies and being shot at. That’s all good fun if you like that sort of thing, but why are we writing about it here? Well, like Deus Ex (covered in an earlier post), Crysis 2 explores a number of interesting biomedical ideas.
The story is set in a war-torn Manhattan, where an alien incursion has turned the city into a dangerous no-go area. The few civilians who remain have become infested with an alien virus, while the aliens themselves have set about building mysterious funnel-like structures that reach into the sky. You play a rogue solider equipped with a powerful state-of-the-art nano(technology)-suit who is hunted by both the CEPH (the aliens) and human forces trying to control the area. The player’s technologically advanced suit is a pawn in a much bigger game that many people wish to possess.
(Past articles here include one on Deus Ex:Human Revolution & Portal 2)
#Cthulhu Thursday: A Picturesque #Cthulhumas!
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, the tree, the presents, the elder things that must not be named… A traditional Cthulhumas!
Have you been good this year? If not then Doom awaits…
Time to make the pudding (from our Cthulhu Christmas Calendar app)
“That is not baked which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even pudding may die.”
But what if Santa feels the Great Cthulhu is encroaching on his turf? What if…
cthulhu vs santa
we also need a seasonal wreath for the door… (from our Cthulhu Christmas Calendar app)
Merry Cthulhumas one and all!
Or how about this one?
Ai! Ai! Cthulhumas!
Game of Phones: #KindleFire Takes No.2 Tablet Spot
So say some independent analyses of sales, which is all we have as Amazon aren’t saying much…
Independent analysts aren’t as shy about estimating Amazon’s Kindle Fire sales, though. CNET spoke with Carter Nicholas, CEO of Datasource, who said “Our estimate is that Amazon.com has now sold 850,000 units direct from the Amazon.com site. Total sales would be substantially larger. Amazon may have sold as many as 2 million or more so far when you consider all sales channels.” Other analysts have even more positive assessments. Market research firm iSuppli says that Amazon will ship 3.9 million tablets by the end of 2011, giving it the second-place market share of nearly 14% behind Apple’s 66% share, well ahead of third place Samsung’s 4.8% market share.
This is really interesting:
The company [Dubit] surveyed 500 children from around the UK, finding that 55 per cent owned at least one toy based on one of Moshi Monsters, Club Penguin, Build-A-BearVille, Poptropica or Webkinz. Seventy-three per cent had played at least one of the games in question.
Forty-seven percent had played Moshi Monsters, the hugely popular online game which now boasts 50 million users and a successful spin-off magazine. Developer Mind Candy is expanding at such a rate that it expects to double its headcount in the next 12 months and was recently valued at £125 million.
In many ways this is no surprise – Pokemon has been mashing the digital and the real for quite some time with its cards and games. As we move into a world of 3D printing, RIDF tags and the like, more interesting things will come of such links…
(Hat-tip to Makielab)
Text Message is 19 years Old Today!
According to Wikipedia, the first SMS message was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom on 3 December 1992, from a man named Neil Papworth using a personal computer to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone using an Orbitel 901 handset.
The text of the message was “Merry Christmas”.
Texting has and is huge. I’m always been impressed with the idea behind Twitter’s 140 character limit, that it matched the 140 limit of an SMS and so built a symbiosis between the two.
Can Social Media Help Predict the Future?
There has been a fluffy of articles online about how close analysis of the masses of data generated by social media and other digital technologies may allow a means of predicting the future, for example:
[There] is an emerging industry aimed at using the tweetstreams of millions of people to help predict the future in some way: disease outbreaks, financial markets, elections and even revolutions. According to new research released today by Topsy Labs — which runs one of the only real-time search engines that has access to Twitter historical data — watching those streams can provide a window into breaking news events. But can it predict what will happen?
The theory behind all of this Twitter-mining is that the network has become such a large-scale, real-time information delivery system (handling more than a quarter of a billion messages every day, according to CEO Dick Costolo at the recent Web 2.0 conference) that it should be possible to analyze those tweets and find patterns that produce some kind of collective intelligence about a topic.
Wired also has an article about the same idea, but from another company seeking to do this sort of data-crunching and prediction:
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
Which all sounds very science-fiction to me, a cross between Minority Report and Asimov’s Foundation novels. One of the issues with both of these stories is the slight degree of hyperbole on the reporting of them; it seems that rather than predicting the future, it is more about a very close reading of existing data trends and being able to spot them before anyone else does. It’s not about the future, it is about the now.
The other issue I see is what famously former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld called, “unknown unknowns“. What I mean by this is that any algorithm applied to the data will only be sensitive to what the creators deem to be important. What is deemed to be important is what we know from the past was important. So to a large degree the warning the system gives of events always has one foot in the past. That is not to say it cannot generate meaningful results, I am sure that is possible, just that it cannot predict the future nor accurately account for trends that have little or no historical precedent.
Hat-tip to Michel for the link. (Also posted on the P2P Foundation Blog.)
Today is the 1st December and our Cthulhu Christmas Calendar opens today!
It’s the first of December! If you’ve got your Cthulhu Christmas Calendar (if not get yours here) then today is the first day it opens (unless you cheated?).
The first image is one we’ve put out with the launch of the app:
“That is not baked which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even pudding may die.”
And the question for this image is:
In the yummy pudding are coins to pay for the bus to Innsmouth, how much is that?
– 60 cents
– 45 cents
– 20 centsI’m not going to give you the answer, but I will hint. (Look away now if you don’t want to know!) The answer lies in the classic story The Shadow Over Innsmouth…
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word “Innsmouth.” He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.
Best of luck…
Indeed.
(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of Mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Also for more Cthulhu news, sign up to the cthulhuHQ twitter feed. Enjoy!)
How Long Should a Video Game Be?
It’s a long known fact that most of the games that gamers play are not completed. Some games, such as Farmville or Tiny Towers, don’t really have an ‘end’. Whereas other games such as Modern Warfare 3 (which I’ve just completed the single player campaign on) do have a very tight narrative structure. It’s an important design question, because if most people don’t get to see the end of a game, then lost of development effort will be wasted. As a games designer I want to make a game that most people will finish. However that means balancing the time needed to complete, with the effort put into each section with the cost of the game as a whole. As such there is this interesting chart on games and finishing:
The bar graphs show how many players earned a campaign completion achievement -- in other words, finished the game -- for the titles listed. (Gamasutra.com)
The above chart is part of a longer article:
Keeping players motivated is difficult. The most popular solution is to manipulate the game’s difficulty using tutorials, dynamic difficulty adjustment, player-selected difficulty settings, feedback systems, userfriendly controls, and in-game hints. The goal is to strike the right balance between difficulty and player ability, thereby always keeping the player within arm’s reach of a new achievement.
Now Modern Warfare is not a huge game to finish – it does not take long. However I don’t feel cheated as a player because the online and co-op split-screen play is great and that gives me loads of replay (assuming the publisher does not try to charge extra for that). By contrast GTA is a huuuuge game with loads going on, much of it not in the main narrative. The single player experience is more than enough to keep you busy, and you enjoy it even if you don’t finish.
As a games designer I use the rule of thumb that; I want to give the player at least 1 hour of gameplay per 1$ spent. So that when we compare the game experience with to going to the cinema (2-3 hours) or a football game (2 hours), it comes out as a good investment for the player. In this rough figure I include core re-play time, where I expect the average player to have to attempt some levels more than once but I don’t include mode replay time with different game modes – that’s a bonus I feel.
By following this rule of thumb, I feel we make games that are always both fun, not overly long and yet always value for money. (I’ve not adapted this rule of thumb for freemium games; that’s an interesting question though…)
Monday Morning Gamification: Dan Dixon’s Talk
I went along to see Dan Dixon talk at the Bath Gamification Network. It was a good talk and here’s the video the organisers made of the event:
A Great Becoming... 