Amazing Fallout 3 History Article

http://www.playthepast.org/?p=459

"Fallout 3 offers much to swoon over. In hindsight though, the most memorable moments from my game play are not slow-motion replays of exploding super mutant heads. Most of the in-game moments that have stuck with me involve interactions with, Apple II-ish green-screened in-game terminals. Computers that have apparently been running since before the nuclear holocaust.
....

"What strikes me about these logs is the layers of authenticity they provide for the kinds of thinking that historians and archeologists use to produce histories. As players unearth and develop a sense of what happened in this world from these kinds of records they do so in strikingly similar ways to historians and archeologists.

"For example: 

Dealing with gaps: There is no complete record. The game requires players to extrapolate from disparate and scant sources. This in part creates the mystery that drives the history game (both for fallout players and for real life historians.)


The documents are full of relevant and irrelevant information: The documents contain all kinds of potentially relevant and irrelevant technical information. Players need to be able to tell what does and doesn’t matter in the morass of materials they come across.


Relevance of the information is connected to what you want to know: The above documents include information about personal reactions, about strategic decision making, about attempts to get into the Vaults. Depending on what you are interested in you will need to pay attention to different parts of the documents."

This has me thinking about why I always said I enjoyed comics so much, because I like to fill in the spaces between the panels.

The Psychology of Shooters

"Why shooting feels so good." by Jamie Madigan of Penny Arcade fame.

Try this experiment: go outside and find some wild animal babies, like wolves and/or toddlers. Got them? Great. Now, watch them play. Many animals, including humans, engage in play fighting where they only pretend to savage each other. In real fights even victors can get hurt, so any risk-free practice is valuable. Of course, no psychologist will tell you that dragon-punching Zangief is going to help you when some bully comes out swinging-but there's a parallel to play fighting in another part of our imagination that can have real benefits.

http://www.gamepro.com/article/features/217312/the-psychology-of-shooters/

Creator of Flickr creates a New Startup, makes her coworkers play Dominion

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_caterina_fake/all/1

Caterina Fake, Hunch’s chief product officer, instigated the weekly game night shortly after she arrived at the Internet startup in June 2008. But on this particular spring night, the whole thing threatens to fall apart. Fake has brought Dominion, a game with such byzantine rules — something to do with monarchs using gold, militias, and witchcraft to seize unclaimed land — that even the MIT-trained engineers struggle to make sense of it. Fake furrows her brow as she studies the rule book. After 20 minutes, it looks like her coworkers are ready to forget the whole thing and head home, but Fake cajoles them into staying just a little longer. “Could somebody turn this music down?” she asks, shooting a glance at the office stereo blaring Girl Talk. “I can’t concentrate.”

WUSSBAGS! Dominion is easy.

Hunch learns about its members through “Teach Hunch About You” questions. These queries can cover anything — exercise regimens, the ethics of SeaWorld, zombies — and the more of them people answer, the more complete a profile Hunch can create. (Since the site launched in June 2009, it has collected 55 million answers to these questions from its 1 million active users.) Once Hunch’s algorithm collects enough data, it can start finding surprising correlations. For instance, people who swat flies have a thing for USA Today. People who believe in alien abductions are more likely than nonbelievers to drink Pepsi. People who eat fresh fruit every day are more likely to desire Canon’s pricey EOS 7D camera. And respondents who cut their sandwiches diagonally rather than vertically are more likely to prefer men’s Ray-Ban sunglasses

This is just like OK Cupid, only with more of a product angle than a human behavior/desire angle. Also, its getting more like Artificial Intellegence ...

But Hunch is arguably the most ambitious social search service. Ultimately, it isn’t just helping people shop for cars — it is getting its users to volunteer a truly impressive amount of unique psychographic data. Just as Google built a vast index of the Web and Facebook constructed a model of our social connections, Hunch is assembling an extraordinarily rich and detailed picture of each user’s taste. From there it can claim to know or extrapolate everything that a person likes or would like. “The ultimate goal of the company is to map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person,” Fake says.

SKYNET! SKYNETTTTTTT

Mining for Mind Diamonds

Super thought provoking article. As a lifetime hoarder and collector of shiny things, I keep thinking, "But I want to be played!" Then again, maybe MMOs are sneakier than Facebook, who hits you with a marketing 2x4 of BUY THIS GAME OR THE PUPPY GETS IT!

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

People scoff at this idea all the time ("You spent all that time working for a sword that doesn't even exist?") and those people are stupid. If it takes time, effort and skill to obtain an item, that item has value, whether it's made of diamonds, binary code or beef jerky.

This is what most of us don't get in everyday life--quick, tangible rewards. It's less about instant gratification and more about a freaking sense of accomplishment. How much harder would we work at the office if we got this, and could measure our progress toward it? And if the light shot from our crotch?