'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'. BENEDIKT, Michael, Cyberspace First Steps.
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. Teach with Portals. Conservation of Momentum Using New Portal 2 Educational Objects. Peregrine glove for the touchy-feely gamer. Philosophy of the Stand-Alone Complex. 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. 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' 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. 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. 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.
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. The Battle for the Minds: Modern Gaming and Propaganda. 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.
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? 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’. The Psychology Of Console Loyalty And Brand Fanboyism. Posted on Sunday, September 9 @ 15:33:47 Eastern by Alex_Osborn.
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. The 6 Most Ominous Trends in Video Games. Our generation will be remembered for our video games.
Cultivated Play: Farmville. The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech. 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted. So, the headlines say somebody else has died due to video game addiction. Sweatshop HD is the latest victim in Apple's war on serious games. According to UK developer Littleloud, Sweatshop HD is an iPad game that "challenged people to think about the origin of the clothes we buy". 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.