'Virtual' Virus Sheds Light on Real-World Behavior. BBC - h2g2 - The Vingean Singularity - A569522. There are scientists who say that technological progress will accelerate indefinitely, causing a mind-boggling change in the basic principles of what we humans affectionately call 'home'. It is a well-known fact among Singularitarians that this event, known as the Singularity1, will occur sometime before the year 2100.
Some attribute this hypothetical event to Vernor Vinge and claim that it is first mentioned in his sci-fi novel True Names and Other Dangers as one of the author's answers to a very interesting question; what would happen if the human race created an artificial intelligence which is more intelligent than its creators? A character in the book finds himself 'precipitated over an abyss' when trying to predict future technology by extrapolating current trends. Vinge feels that when humans create an intelligence greater than their own, 'human history will have reached a kind of singularity'. A Brief Explanation f(t) = -1 / t Exponential versus Hyperbolic Paths to the Singularity. BENEDIKT, Michael, Cyberspace First Steps.
Why Portal 2? | Physics with Portals. Really, the question should read, “Why the Source engine?” Over the years, game developers have recognized that the easiest way to make ultra realistic games is to build a game world that follows laws of physics. Rather than using a blank slate and adding objects with imbued laws of physics, game developers have created a physics backbone that determines how objects should behave.
Let’s say a game developer wanted to build a game with two boxes of different masses and dimensions that both follow the laws of physics. Being that they have different densities and surface areas, they should fall through the air differently. Essentially, modern game developers use specialized physics simulators, called physics engines, to make games. There are numerous physics engines in use by modern games . While Source doesn’t stand apart in its technological capabilities, Valve has inadvertently added features that make it the perfect solution for classroom physics simulations. Like this: Like Loading...
Teach with Portals. Conservation of Momentum Using New Portal 2 Educational Objects. Peregrine glove for the touchy-feely gamer | 30 Days of Innovation. Iron Will Innovations, a small, Canada-based company, has spent the last five years dedicated to the development of something it believes will not only transform the way consumers interact with their computers, but may contribute to military technology as well. This year at CES, Iron Will is exhibiting a technology it calls The Peregrine. Though WASD keyboard commands come second nature to most gamers, Peregrine is this year's contender in the race to replace the keyboard. Peregrine is an elastic, military-grade glove that can recognize up to 30 customizable hand gestures. Wires are threaded throughout the glove and communicate by user-defined hot spots.
Ideally, the glove would be wireless, but the Peregrine is wired via a USB-connected pod that attaches to the glove. Iron Will Innovations is marketing the glove as a gaming accessory, but the company is also developing the device for military use. Philosophy of the Stand-Alone Complex. The Psychology of Video Games | Examining the intersection of psychology and video games. Video games are designed to get you hooked. This article originally appeared on The Fix. It has been corrected since it was first published. Video games like Farmville and Words With Friends are specifically designed to get people hooked, with the industry even hiring psychiatric professionals to help make them more addictive.
And the tactic seems to be working. Recent research shows that video games can be just as addictive as drugs, alcohol or gambling. ”It’s the same exact clinical symptoms: preoccupation, loss of control, inability to stop,” says Dr. Still, the American Psychiatric Association is unwilling to recognize video game addiction as an official diagnosis. Joi Ito - MMORPG Culture. Goonswarm Burns Jita in EVE Online; CCP Applies Azithromycin - MMO Anthropology. Goonswarm, EVE Online Mourns Death of Sean Smith "Vile Rat" Friend and Diplomat - MMO Anthropology. The Art of War in EVE Online. Hackers slaughter thousands in 'World of Warcraft' "World of Warcraft" has suffered a cataclysm. And we're not talking about "Cataclysm," the expansion to the hugely popular online fantasy game.
We're talking about a massive epidemic of virtual deaths brought on by a plague ... of hackers. On Sunday, thousands of players of the game suddenly found their characters dropping dead for what seemed to be no reason. Virtual corpses piled up in the cities of Stormwind and Orgrimmar as well as Tarren Mill, Ragnaros and others. According to Blizzard, the game's publisher, it was hackers that caused the mass die off. Earlier today, certain realms were affected by an in-game exploit, resulting in the deaths of player characters and non-player characters in some of the major cities. Meanwhile, a person going by the name Jadd on YouTube and in the forums at "WoW" hack and exploit site Ownedcore has claimed responsibility for the virtual apocalypse. "We didn't do any permanent damage," Jadd writes. "We hope you find it as funny as we do! — via TGDaily. The Zeigarnik Effect and Quest Logs. What do waiters in a 1920s Venetian restaurant and today’s average role-playing game fan have in common?
They both tend to remember what they have yet to finish. Sometime during the 1920s, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in an Austrian restaurant (or maybe German; accounts differ) when she noticed something peculiar: waiters displayed an unusual ability to remember complex orders while they were being filled, allowing them to deliver the right combination of food to the right tables. But oddly, that information vanished from memory as soon as the eats were put in place (or maybe it was after the bill was paid; again, accounts differ). It didn’t seem to have much to do with sustained mental effort or chanting the incomplete orders under their breath to hold them in short-term memory.
Instead, the orders that hadn’t yet been filled just seemed to nag at the waiters’ minds until they were checked off as complete. MMOs are designed so that your list of tasks is never done. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. The psychology of... Avatars. Our appearance changes every day. When we get up each morning, we decide what clothes and jewellery to wear, which hairs to shave and which to style. All of this varies by occasion, and some of us make more radical alterations as well, such as getting tattoos, piercings or cosmetic surgery. In real life, though, we’re often limited in the changes we can make to appear taller, say, or more prosperous. Videogames and virtual realities, on the other hand, are more flexible.
They can let us be a hulking brute, a sultry minx or a fleet-footed athlete. We might even choose to be a different species altogether. Or we can just be ourselves, but with flawless skin or huge pectoral muscles. Researchers have been studying the reactions to our real appearance in others for a long time, but they’ve also started to seriously study the psychology of our avatars. Explaining why we adopt some the avatars we do is easy: it’s down to the demands of the game. The psychology of... High scores. During the heyday of the coin-operated videogame arcade, there was little better than seeing our name – well, our initials at least – in lights on a game’s high score list. And it was agonising to see it fall off the bottom, replaced by smug strings of characters representing those who had often accrued mere handfuls of points more. Friendly rivalries led us to feed coin after coin into machines such as Dig Dug , Donkey Kong and Pole Position just so that we could provide incontrovertible evidence that our skills trumped those of our friends.
The proof was right there on the screen – at least until the arcade attendant unplugged the cabinet at the end of the night. Games have evolved a lot since then, but the concept of comparing our performance against others has remained. In other words, not all comparisons are equal. The answer lies with what has become known as ‘social comparison theory’. Firstly, in many ways it’s who you’re comparing yourself to that matters the most. The Psychology Of: free-to-play. Currently, free-to-play games are making quite the killing in the marketplace, although it’s death by a thousand microtransactions. The idea, as the name suggests, is that you can play for free, but you can also pay for in-game conveniences, such as new content and time savers.
It’s been a massive success, and the model is now something of an industry darling, much to the chagrin of certain developers. In 2010, game creator and noted essayist Ian Bogost reacted to the rise of free-to-play principles by reducing them to their essence in his tongue-in-cheek Cow Clicker. In the game, the main action players could take was to click a cow every few hours in order to get a ‘you clicked your cow’ message and a satisfying moo, but they could also buy in-game ‘Mooney’ and spend it to reduce the cow-clicking cooldown.
Amazingly, Bogost’s satirical experiment caught on and turned into a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that was soon shaking down the locals for real money. The Battle for the Minds: Modern Gaming and Propaganda | Games Abyss. Propaganda in videogames is becoming ever-more prevalent, harnessed by governments, Special Interest Groups, militaries and the PR industry to indoctrinate an overwhelmingly young audience of gamers. In the popular Battlefield and Call of Duty franchises, we see it exhibited in its most crude form. The manipulation of thought, the manufacturing of consent and shaping of ideologies has its modern roots at the start of the First World War. The UK’s Ministry of information, established to whip a pacifist civilian population into rabid anti-German fanatics, shaped forever the landscape in the Battle for the Minds.
Its successes did not go unnoticed, impressing the Business World, spawning the modern PR industry, Governments, who decided that control of its population must be fought through the mind and not force and even Hitler, who claimed that Germany lost the war as a result of superior Anglo-American propaganda. Post contributed by Stuart Mario. Questions for the author? 78share 1share. The psychology of... Genres. Genres, and debate surrounding them, are nothing new. When gamers disagree on these labels, it can result in diatribes, appeals to dogma, and even existential crises in extreme cases.
To which genre do the Deus Ex games belong? Is thirdperson shooter a full genre or merely a sub-genre? Is that the same as a so-called ‘character action game’? The topic is even stickier when you’re a game reviewer selecting genre-based touchstones for your readers, or a retail store clerk trying to figure out which section to stash all those copies of Mass Effect 3 in. With today’s complex range of games, wouldn’t it be easier to eschew genres and rise above petty distinctions? Wouldn’t it be better to leave tags off reviews, sort games alphabetically, and collapse the sub-forums of message boards down so that we can discuss any game anywhere?
Well, no: we need genres and we use them in ways you may not have thought of. But think about a far more complex situation, such as renting a flat. The psychology of... Nostalgia. Do you remember Odysseus, the protagonist of Homer’s 2,800-year-old epic poem The Odyssey? Well, he’s more relevant than you might think to all these modern reboots of older franchises, such as XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition. As researcher Tim Wildschut and his colleagues note in Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions (published in the Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology), Odysseus’s ordeal is a good illustration of nostalgia as it was originally conceived. The word itself derives from the Greek words ‘nostos’, meaning ‘returning’, and ‘algos’, or ‘suffering’. Thus The Odyssey’s 10-year span can be seen as our hero experiencing a huge bout of nostalgia as he struggles to return to the way things were and get back to his wife in Ithaca.
Much later, in the 1600s, a few Swiss physicians and fans of neologism coined the term ‘nostalgia’ in reference to a certain kind of homesickness. It’s a state of affairs that isn’t lost on developers and publishers. The Psychology Of Console Loyalty And Brand Fanboyism. Posted on Sunday, September 9 @ 15:33:47 Eastern by Alex_Osborn Undying console loyalty—or for the lack of a better term, fanboyism—has plagued the industry since its inception. In the early '90s it was the epic feud between Genesis lovers and SNES loyalists, shortly followed thereafter by Sony's entry in the gaming market, which birthed a community of PlayStation loyalists hell-bent against all in favor of the Nintendo 64 or Dreamcast. And judging by how cluttered the internet has become with ranting and raving on whether the PS3 or Xbox 360 is the superior console, not a whole lot has changed since the early days—if anything, it has only gotten worse.
So why is it that so many gamers spend hours upon hours of their lives feverishly typing day after day on message boards with the sole intention of trying to convince the internet that their favorite console is undoubtled the best place to experience all that gaming has to offer? Honestly, the answer to that question is simple. Jesse Schell: Visions of the Gamepocalypse. ALEXANDER ROSE:I'm Alexander Rose; I'm the Director of the Long Now Foundation.
As some of you know who come to these talks every month we do a little short film before each talk which we call a "long short". This is a shortterm film that exemplifies longterm thinking. Our long short this month is called "Pixel". Alright enjoy. STEWART BRAND:I'm Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation. Product Placement, it's a good book. The 6 Most Ominous Trends in Video Games. Our generation will be remembered for our video games. Every generation is remembered by its popular art; when you think of the 60s you think of Woodstock and hippie music. When you think of the 80s, you think of Miami Vice and the birth of music video. So when your grandchildren think of the 2010s, what will they picture in their minds? Let's put it this way: Seriously. Regular readers know I made a similar graphic based on last year's games. The problems with gaming go beyond the fact that every major blockbuster game coming in the next year seems to involve looking through glass sights at a terrorist or zombie.
(We're worried that you might not see our new Star Wars mini-series. The Technology is Going Backward I remember a time when I had absolutely no worries about the future of gaming. Via Nintendo.com"Gaming is saved, and the global economy ain't never gonna collapse, baby! " But more than four years later, nothing on the Wii has equaled it. "Waaaaait a second! "Kill me next! " A. B. Cultivated Play: Farmville. The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech. 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted. Sweatshop HD is the latest victim in Apple's war on serious games | Sweatshop HD news | iPad.
Sweatshop. This 8-Bit Style Riot Sim looks pretty rad » BabySoftMurderHands - Gaming News & More. Country based GitHub users activity. The Neural Archive. FunnyHandSignals.jpg (JPEG Image, 1260 × 1936 pixels) - Scaled (38%) Download Ultima VIII - Pagan. Urban Legends of Video Gaming #9. SINNESLOSCHEN.