rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

my parents pretty much let me play whatever but once i was playing wolf3D and my dad stood behind me and watched me shoot nazis for a while and then launched into this impromptu dramatic scene where he played both the dead nazi's wife and the dead nazi's son, who was waiting up that night for his father to come home because he'd made him some kind of present but his father was late coming home and it was way past his bedtime and his mother was saying just go to bed dear you'll see him in the morning etc

omg

i liked the bit near the end of snake eater where you have to brush shudderingly past the moaning zombie bodies of every single enemy you killed to get to that point

spoiler alert! jk, man i gotta get around to that one

someone tell me if this fits here:
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/2012/07/38-studios-end-game/print/

It was posted last week on Curt Schilling, 38 Studios, and Rhode Island , but it is def. worth reading.

It's an interesting question whether it's really 'about' videogames, like is it just that now games are Bigger Than Hollywood, they take the monorail slot of things dumb people on town / county / state councils can be easily convinced are worth throwing money at.

And the fact that Curt Schilling was apparently an enormous WoW-head - he must've been a nightmare, albeit a familiar one.

Though I've heard of various states/countries offering tax incentives for video game developers, this is the first true Monorail-style public funding debacle (love this use of the Monorail ref btw) revolving around a video game company

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2012/8/1/playing-to-win-in-badminton.html

I knew he'd have something to say about the bizarre Badminton Olympic scandal, as it was a perfect example of "playing to win" (but getting lol DQ'd)

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-do-we-need-corporations-for-and-how-does-valves-management-structure-fit-into-todays-corporate-world/

(not really "on videogames")

I like that he started it with a content schema

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

Sorry, this is not worth 'reading' but most definitely interesting stuff. John Carmack of iD software giving a 3.5 hour presentation at 2012 QuakeCon. It's very fascinating, and at the very least it's gotten me extremely excited to see what they do with Doom 4. He spends a large chunk of this discussing Virtual Reality. I'm of the generation that saw Dactyl Nightmare at a mall in the 90s and it's interesting to hear a sort of refresher course on the state of VR these days. After diving into that world and finding the advances to be really rather underwhelming, he's spent a lot of time and thought researching the field, tinkering with homemade VR headsets, thinking about the future of gaming, etc.

At the very end, he's asked about the end goal of the march towards realism. Is it photo-realistic graphics? I like his answer in that we pretty much have that in sight now (the seamlessness of CGI in current movies) but that the evolution of I/O devices is really what going to take the future of games to a whole new level.

It's a really amazing talk and if anyone wants to discuss what he's talking about, I'd be all too happy to do so!

Carmack is still a great speaker - I'm probably gonna spend several days watching this thing to completion. Though it makes me a little sad that I never did play Doom 3 or Rage (or Quake 4, or Enemy Territory: Quake Wars) but tbh none of them looked that exciting

Not playing Doom 3 is nothing to be sad about if you spent that time walking about, smelling flowers, or alternatively playing Resident Evil or something.

Yeah i never played Doom 3 either. I did marvel at how amazing Rage looked (my roommates had it) but when i tried playing using PS2 controls i just royally sucked. I think i will be forever a mouse-and-keys guy...

Really want to know what's up with VR and why we aren't walking around in headsets 24/7 already goddamnit, but not enough to watch a 3.5 hour developer talk.

There are some shorter videos where Carmack is talking about the Oculus Rift headset. Main problem is that current VR gear has terrible latency - there's a big delay between you moving your head and the view changing to match.

Also current VR headsets have a very narrow field of view - like looking at everything through a couple of toilet rolls.

ledge: shorter pitches here: http://oculusvr.com/

this is a really interesting video. damn, 2 hours to go. :(

VR is too immersive, nobody wants to be blind and deaf to the outside world. the two people i saw playing dactyl horror(?) looked like complete dorks from the outside.

(that said, i did fancy those char davies VR art pieces though)

(the google glasses might be a way around that, although i'd argue that's AR rather than VR)

I'm fine with being blind and deaf to the outside world if I'm doing it at home rather than in an arcade. No problem looking like a dork if nobody's watching.

dork like no-one is watching

it's not like anyone can see your face

it's like pooping in public restrooms

get over yourself, hide your shoes so nobody recognizes you, it feels great dude

thanks for reminding me of all those times i played the original guitar hero in public

Biggest problem will be, where are you going to do this? If you are playing an FPS in your room you're going to walk into the wall within a minute or two. Treadmills, spinning gyroscopic machines, etc is all too weird. Maybe it will just be instead of using your mouse to aim and look around, you'll do so with your head, but moving forward and shooting and all that will still be with a controller. Direct neural stimulation seems like the only complete solution.

It would probably be way cool to just play a game with the headset they are working on, with a giant range of view, tho.

'all too weird' should be 'all to weird and expensive for the average consumer'

i can't believe in 2012 i'm still into watching john carmack talk endlessly. but he's still a shockingly good speaker - i mean, i can only reference maybe 25% of what he's talking about but i get the gist of what he's saying

really want to try out this headset now - i definitely appreciate his couching of expectations (the individual screens are only 680x800) - but yeah, I do think about how right now they're cumbersome and wired, and as he mentions, what they would do to create a play room with props to interact. Ya know, just like Nick Arcade! Carmack sidestepped talking AR since apparently Michael Abrash was coming in the next day to specifically talk about it, but that of course seems like a natural fit for the headset.

the neural stimulation stuff he briefly mentions at the end sounds pretty scary to me actually, but it makes sense that at some point we'll have tech that can go there - not sure if it'll happen within our lifetime

bottom line, he's a fascinating dude and it's cool that he takes all this time outside of gaming to work on mad science

the future of gaming http://tinypaperclips.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/home.jpeg

Playing violent games may increase tolerance to pain by up to 65%

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/09/vilerat/

i feel like a blithe anthropologist whenever I read EVE pieces

I didn't even know that game existed, basically.

There's a lot of interesting articles out there about it... the story about the biggest corporate infiltration was pretty fascinating if i remember

kinda love these rabbit hole obsessions -
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/akira/jimgregory.htm

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20120916.gif

Awes

i want to read this, come on Kickstarter

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/darrenwall/sensible-software-19861999-by-read-only-memory

It's so fucked up when internet people you have a connection to or share a board with get caught up in world events and don't make it out. Like, it's one thing to hear about horrid shit going on, and quite another to have an online connection in some way.

http://www.tomvsbruce.com/index.php/2012/09/17/tom-vs-bruce-dune-wars

The Dune series featured an all-powerful emperor who ruled the universe and whose autocratic methods spawned the cleverly named Fremen (a disguised spelling of the words “free men” meant to get past the era’s draconian entertainment media censorship) paralleling the civil rights marchers and Congolese mercenaries who were their contemporary philosophic brethren. Games of that time were often centered on all-powerful characters, known as “bosses”, who were the apotheoses of various oppressive ideologies and whose defeat in computer games presaged their real life demise. Political figures like Richard Nixon, military leaders like Marshal McLuhan, and religious demagogues like the Pope of Greenwich Village all met their virtual doom at the hands of rocket-launcher-wielding social reformers. The groundbreaking game “Doom”, known for its seemingly endless succession of boss fights, was actually a play on the name “Dune” and was largely an homage to its predecessor’s anti-establishment ethic. Today’s video games, centered on vapid exchanges between electronic “friends” sharing no common experience except the acquisition of a few more broadband approval badges, are a far cry from the pioneering days of computer gaming, when so many developers were harassed, imprisoned, and even executed for daring to squeeze a few bytes of democracy into 16k of code.

There's a lot of interesting articles out there about it... the story about the biggest corporate infiltration was pretty fascinating if i remember

― Nhex, Thursday, September 13, 2012 2:22 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

totally remember that one, pretty fascinating, it was basically a William Gibson novel

military leaders like Marshal McLuhan

am i missing something here

I have only read a bit of it so far but I am guessing that it's talking about the Civ4 thing where "great people" will be born, and it'll be a randomly cohsen "great person" name and they might have different job than what you expect (ie. Isaac Newton, Diplomat... etc).

I should probably read it tho.

ohhh

odd article
http://www.heraldscotland.com/mobile/arts-ents/film/game-on-and-on-and-on-and-on-and-on.18937122?_=c5aa09e5f00033397bb3eed2b4343318bc216f7b

Thus, my opening paradox. The artform of gaming is at a strange juncture. In a way, it's similar to the stalled mainstream cinema of today: just take a look at all those repetitive superhero movies getting one boring retread after another. But then, at least today in cinema, there is a vibrant indie and underground scene.

um

So where are our independent games producers? There's plenty of games out there coming from small producers but, believe me, they're terrible, so bad a baby would get bored with them.

um... even on iOS alone that claim is patently wrong

case #2139993824 of ignorant lack of research in a video game article

i have not read/listened to either of these things yet but i've been meaning to

wonkbook post on greek economist and valve employee Yanis Varoufakis

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/28/the-economics-of-video-games/

interview with him by Doug Henwood from july

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S120705

i thought that economics of video games article was fascinating