Fictional Games Made Real
Science fiction and fantasy are full of weird games, from Quiddich to Pyramid. There are games of death. There are games of skill. But most of all, there are games that you’d have to be nuts to try and duplicate in real life.
Not that that’s stopped people from trying. Here are 10 fictional games that some totally demented people have tried to bring to life in the real world.
And it goes to to look at, amongst others; Calvinball from Calvin and Hobbes, Pyramid from Battlestar Galactica and the now classic Tri-Dimensional Chess from Star Trek.
But the game nobody has yet recreated I’d like to see is Azad, featured in The Player of Games….
Hat-tip to Dan for the link.
Lovecraft’s 121st Birthday
We did a little event yesterday for Lovecraft’s 121st birthday…
My sister (who makes yummy cakes, check them out here) kindly baked a special HPL Birthday cake with the cool cover art from Astounding Stories February-April 1936, where Lovecraft published ‘At the Mountains of Madness‘ one of his best stories IMHO. So we had a little tea party of horror (;,;)
PSVita Gameplay from Gamescom
I’ve been looking at the videos coming out of Gamescom showing Sony’s new handheld, the PSVita (was NGP) like this one:
Graphically it looks pretty good, but then that has always been Sony’s strong point. What is also interesting is how the control features of the Vita are put to use during gameplay. The touchscreen to aim grenades looks a nice feature and the use of the tilt to duck behind objects is a good idea. Its hard to know what it feels like to play from a video, as which it looks good, its all about how it plays. Though at this stage it does look like the Vita is making the most of the advanced hardware it has in separating it out from the crowd of smart phones as a gaming device…
Cthulhu Thursday: Back for For Evil
Last time was fun, so I’m back for more of the same slimy horror with more oddities found on the net during my research for The Wasted Land.
So I was looking, and what did I see? This amazing miniature work! (Sadly cross-posting the image did not work. No image makes Mi-Go sad 😦
That was not all. Turns out that Lady Cthulhu had gone to ComicCon and got mauled by a bear! Fur vs Squid in a battle to the death.
Lady Cthulhu at ComicCon
Then this image. The kindly cultists have gone and gotten lunch for the Great Cthulhu and what does he do? Just wanders off…. So rude.
Cthulhu ignores lunch
(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!)
The Plots of Bioshock and Brink Come to Life…
Bioshock is set in an underground kingdom created by a libertarian to escape the state control and taxes of everyday life. Brink sees a high-tech utopian island for the rich overwhelmed by refusees as the seas rise due to climate change. All fictional plots, until…
Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.
Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be “a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.”
Few restrictions on weapons? Yes sounds like the setting for a first-person shooter!
Windows Phone 7’s Apps Ecosystem – a 90 Day Race?
This is from an interview with the outgoing Microsoft person, Charlie Kindel, who’s job is to build the mobile app ecosystem for Windows Mobile 7:
Q: How do you feel about the state of the Windows Phone developer ecosystem at this point, and Windows Phone overall?
Kindel: I’m extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished. When we started we knew it was a marathon, not a sprint. In my view, the first release represented the first leg of the marathon. We clearly got through that leg in a very credible way. We have close to 27,000 apps in the marketplace, the best toolset, and amazingly high customer satisfaction. We would not have gotten to the table with Nokia if they didn’t believe we were in the race to win long term. We’re now in the middle phase of the marathon. This is where Microsoft’s stamina genes will come into play.
27,000 apps sounds good. But when the iOS has 300 apps released per day, that means it only takes Apple’s system 90 days to add another 27,000 apps. Microsoft need more that just stamina now, they need a Cambrian explosion in their ecosystem.
Monday Morning Gamification: Is It Bu****it?
I’ve written a little on the danger of over-hyping gamification. Well others have also weighed in on the issue. Here’s Ian Bogost:
Gamification is bullshit.
I’m not being flip or glib or provocative. I’m speaking philosophically.
More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.
Bullshitters are many things, but they are not stupid. The rhetorical power of the word “gamification” is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.
In 1960, Milton Bradley published »The Game of Life«: a capitalist wet dream of a board game, won by the lucky one who retired richest. Today, »gamification« vendors take Milton Bradley seriously. From losing weight to saving Africa, from watching TV to matching DNA sequences: there’s nothing that couldn’t be made more fun by adding points, badges, and other elements from video games. At least that’s the selling proposition.
But a quick glance at current »gamified« applications shows that they drastically fall short of the promise of games and play. So it’s time to step up and ask some serious questions: Can life be a game? Should it? And if so, who is playing whom? This talk walks through some issues of gameful and playful design before delving into the ethics of design – and the lessons games may truly hold for us.
Broadly I agree with both, except that it depends what you mean by Gamification – I do think it can be done well, but yes, as a simple marketing trick, I don’t buy it…
Jules Verne Meets Lovecraft
Jules Verne meets Lovecraft – Nice image 🙂
from mykeamend.com
The 10% Tipping Point of Ideas in a Population
This is fascinating. According to research, once around 10% of the population believe firmly in an issue, then even though a minority, it is enough of the population to create a tipping point to influence a societal-wide change:
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.
“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”
As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. “In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks.”
However it leaves as many questions as it answers; what do we mean by ‘committed opinion holders’? Is that people willing to die for that belief? What happens when there are competing 10%s of the population with opposing ideas, such as in the US culture wars? I had been told before that during the American War of Independence, around 10% of the population supported the rebels and around 10% the English crown and the other 80% waiting around to see where the balance would tip, though I have no reference for that, can’t remember where I heard it!
(Hat-tip to Michel for the link. Also posted on P2P Foundation Blog.)
Cthulhu Thursday: A Reprise of Horror
Yes, ok, so I stopped doing Cthulhu Thursday as I’ve been busy. But just because I’ve stopped, the horror (and fun) has not. So here’s a few things I came across on my journey into the dark corners of the web while researching for Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land…
Cthulhu vs Godzilla. Yes, I did say that! Cthulhu vs Godzilla. My money is on the big green guy.
Godzilla vs Cthulhu by aquilianranger
That Minecraft game – its mining horror! The horror!
cthulhu skin for Minecraft
We’re not done yet… A really amazing alternative take on Cthulhu:
another take on Cthulhu....
(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!)
A Great Becoming... 