Kill Ten Rats

Few things give me more irritation and grief than your common, garden-variety escort mission. Years ago I came to the personal realization that, well, I didn’t have to do them. I like to think my life has gotten better as a result of that. I can say that I’ve been reasonably free and clear for years.

Yes, every now and then I’m forced to take a hit and do one or two. But believe me, it’s not by choice. A designer somewhere had the idea of putting one of those in the middle of a primary quest line, or even worse as the necessary step to perform in order to progress into another area. That’s how it is. I hate them. With a passion. But sometimes we’re forced to do them. I don’t think I’m alone in this.

Just what is it about escort missions that make me feel as if I had eaten week-old meatloaf?

Continue reading Escort Service

With the latest brouhaha and folderol about how video games are polluting our nation’s bodily fluids, I am reminded that this is an election year. This is a link to the Video Game Voters Network. Each party has at least one primary candidate running against free expression. One ran ads against violent video games in her re-election campaign, while another is against free speech more generally. The leading anti-video game advocate, Senator Lieberman, is sitting out this election cycle so far, apart from endorsing Senator McCain.

People still burn books, you know.

This is not an open thread on the candidates, but if you would like to discuss their views on video games, free speech, or expression generally, feel free. Please be polite and on-topic, as if everyone (the candidates included) were in the room, rather than the standard internet political discussion. (We usually avoid politics, and I do not want to use the Mod Stick on the comments.)

: Zubon

You may have heard about this already…some psychologist (Cooper Lawrence, author of The Cult of Perfection) was on Fox News the other day talking about Mass Effect and using it as an example of how games objectify women, and how terrible that particular game is with full frontal nudity and explicit sex (marketed to young boys no doubt). Geoff Keighley was there to present the side of the game industry. You can see a clip of the segment (and the commentary by the “panel” afterwards over on Kotaku.

Ok, this is where things get fun. This woman has never played Mass Effect, she mentions some “research report” (if anyone can find a link to this let me know, I want to read it myself), her facts were all dismally wrong, and she actually called Geoff “darling”. Unbelievable.

Continue reading [[UPDATED]] Pot calls Kettle Black…gamers give author grief…

This is one of my favorite insights.

ROUNDERS: This group rounds things off. A problem that’s a two on a scale of one to ten gets rounded to zero. If a rounder has five problems that are all about a two on a scale of one to ten, he’ll tell you he has no problems.

ACCUMULATORS: Accumulators add up all the little problems until they equal one big problem. If an accumulator has five problems that are each a two on a scale of one to ten, that feels like having one problem that’s a ten.

Rounders are generally happy, because they perceive their lives to be mostly problem-free. Accumulators are often miserable because “nothing is going right.”

If you are a rounder, a game can have a thousand bugs without there being any real problem, because no single one is large enough to be a deal-breaker. On the other hand, six rounds up to a ten, so any fairly big thing could end it all.

If you are an accumulator, the problems keep stacking up. A typo here, a pathing error there, and eventually a 3% too long load time is the final straw. You quit with a forum post listing a dozen broken things, and you get really angry when the rounders dismiss them one at a time instead of seeing the big picture.

So are you the idiot who puts up with anything until one slightly more buggy than usual patch crosses your threshold into the apocalypse? Or are you the idiot who cannot work around minor bugs while the game finds its legs? And don’t you hate that other kind idiot who just cannot see what is wrong here?

: Zubon

Why waste money on that big monitor when you could have two tiny ones?

Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

That’s right, we are on our way to Rainbows End with augmented reality. If you want immersive gameplay, project the game onto your retina. Tiny solar cells can bring power and your new monitor can also correct your vision, or why not go beyond that to built-in image-enhancement, binoculars, or wireless input from cameras in the area? Bonus points for the first guy who puts his vision as an ongoing real-time webcast, which will get surreal when the live broadcast is him editing that web page.

This will revolutionize porn.

: Zubon