LTL
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
The Philosophy of Game Design (part 1)
The Escapist Magazine. If you've ever said that a videogame was "bad" for any reason - is evil, is nothing new, is too hard, is pretentious, is inaccessible, is sexist - in the performance of your royal duties as Grand Arbiter of Good Taste, then you also have to define and articulate what is a "good" game for us simple-minded folk. So, what makes a "good" game?
Making Computer Games Is Easy « Meditations on First Gaming Phil
Well, not really. Obviously the process of actually making a real game is laboriously difficult and beset with more problems than you could ever presuppose (which is sort of the point), so difficult that any project of any size will find it hard to ever estimate how long their game will take to make. If we are talking man hours to actual end content making games is ludicrously difficult. So maybe we can say finishing a game is hard, but actually making one? As in, getting out a tech demo/general proof of concept and letting it evolve?
Taekwan Kim's Blog - Validation Theory
Today, I’d like to propose a very basic idea: a consequence is a reward whenever it validates the player. Conversely, and more importantly, a consequence is a punishment whenever it in validates the player. Simple, yes? Perhaps simplistic even.
This large post has the final version of my dissertation, be advised that the word count came in at 6585 words, it’s a long read but you should be able to just skip to the Further Issues & The Nature of Puzzles sections right at the end without losing out on too much content. The Challenge of Puzzle Solving in Games – Robert Farr Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of BA in Creative Computer Games Design at Swansea Metropolitan University (Formerly Swansea Institute of Higher Education) Table of Contents Word Count 6585
Dissertation « The Dreaming Game Designer
"You are outgunned. You are massively outnumbered. You must win." These are your orders.
Arcen Games, LLC - AI War Features
Game Theory
We’re gathered in a conference room on the Berkeley campus, the detritus of a LAN party scattered around us. The table is covered with computers and pizza, and there’s a game of StarCraft projected on the screen. Oriol Vinyals, a PhD student in computer science, is commanding the Terran army in a life-or-death battle against the forces of the Zerg Swarm.
Skynet meets the Swarm: how the Berkeley Overmind won the 2010 StarCraft AI competition
Gamers beat algorithms at finding protein structures
Today's issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list. Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is... an online gaming community. Scientists have turned to games for a variety of reasons, having studied virtual epidemics and tracked online communities and behavior , or simply used games to drum up excitement for the science .
i! Patrick Buckland here, CEO and owner of Stainless Games , the developer of Duels of the Planeswalkers . Last Wednesday, I wrote about the engine that drives Duels . In that article, I explained that the Magic engine is self-contained (separate from the user interface or any other code) and instance-based (you can have more than one of them at once). This separation has many advantages, some of which I talked about, but the stand-alone nature of the Magic engine is vital in another respect: the AI.
Duels of the Planeswalkers: All about AI
Toastyfrog.com: Compendium of Useless Information : Games - The
Games | The Difficulty of Difficulty Article by Kat ? | September 29, 2008 There was a time when difficulty was the name of the game, the thing that made sure that kept gamers plugging quarters into those arcade machines. The patron saint of coin-ops everywhere blessed gamers with impossible jumps, waves of difficult enemies and a hell of a lot of bullets to dodge. Naturally, that mentality carried over to the home consoles, and ended up meshing fairly well with the limitations of games at that time.
(iStockphoto) Demis Hassabis, a research fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit , University College London , is out to create a radical new kind of artficial brain. A former well-known UK videogame designer and programmer, he has produced a number of amazing games, including the legendary Evil Genius — which he denies selling to Microsoft, thus ruining a perfectly good joke. He also won the World Games Championships a record five times. But in 2005, he decided to move from narrow AI (used in his games) to a bigger challenge: creating artificial general intelligence (AGI). He decided to get a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, because “I felt it would be crazy to ignore the brain as a blueprint for new technologies for creating AGI,” he told me in a Skype chat from London.
