A Series of Tubes

It is important to exercise your mind. That is why I try to engage in tasks that improve my attention, memory, and executive control. To be fair I don’t actively try to quantize my activities that way, but recently found out that one of my favorite activities has this exact side effect. That activity: video games.

Researchers at Beckman Institute, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL,  found that “Expert gamers and non-gamers differed on a number of basic cognitive skills: experts could track objects moving at greater speeds, better detected changes to objects stored in visual short-term memory, switched more quickly from one task to another, and mentally rotated objects more efficiently.”  I’m probably not allowed to repost sections of the body of the article, but the abstract sums up the findings nicely.

When I go home I think I’ll have to work on improving my cognitive skills.

The 2009 Game Developers conference in San Fransisco ended 2 days ago.  Last year one of the big winners was World of Goo.  The developers decided to release their game without any DRM.  It’s about a year since the games release and since then the piracy rate for world of goo is 90% and the World of Go Publisher went bankrupt.  I’m not sure how linked those two events are since 2DBoy, the developers of world of goo , is still doing fine.  If I knew that my game was getting a 90% piracy rate I would probably jump on the DRM bandwagon, but surprisingly 2DBoy is sticking with and encouraging their original decision.  The argument made by 2DBoy is that DRM will get cracked and will only degrade the experience for paying customers while the pirates and thiefs wind up with a better game experience.

An important point to note is that the 90% of the people that didn’t buy the game are not lost sales since only a percentage of those pirates would have actually paid for the game if they couldn’t get an illegal copy.  Also once a DRM scheme is implemented there are lost sales due to a degraded game experience, so one should be able to calculate a direct cost benefit for implementing DRM.  If someone knows of an impartial and well researched article, one not written by a game company or someone with an axe to grind in the argument, let me know.  I’d like to see if the 90% piracy rate is a number that is found across the industry, how DRM schemes compare at increasing or decreasing sales, and if this number compares to the music industry.

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I want a crow vending machine. Then I can control them as my minions:

On an unrelated note you should check out this crazy animation.

In an effort to comment on gamespot’s coverage of the GDC, or lack of coverage with regards to independent games, I created a gamespot login. Apparently in order to actually comment on their website you have to have been a member of their website for at least 3 days or so before you can post in certain places or change your picture or do anything that you would automatically be able to do on a normal website. It is a huge pain.

As you can see I am a rank 2 gamespotter which means that I can browse the website with about as much authority as if I randomly came across the site on the web. I have the title of journeyman because I am currently on a painful journey to be able to post on a website. Eventually I could achieve the rank of “captain able to post stuff” or perhaps “sergeant can now change the picture next to my name”.

I was trying to comment on one of the few articles that I could find about the IGF at the GDC: link to the article here.

So the guy behind world of goo made a different game, one about robots, in 7 days. What is impressive to me is the artistic nature of the game and how fun and addictive the gameplay is. The first time I played I didn’t realize that I could buy more than 1 robot and that I had to hover over the hearts that drop. I guessI should have read the instructions in the background. Have a go at the robot game (it’s flash so you can play in your browser). Just click the image below.

Since it is an unfinished idea, I think demonstrates really great artistic talent and great game design right off the bat. This sort of thing makes me glad that I got World of Goo.

So I went to the GDC with a free pass. There were demos and things to see from the major studios, but the most exciting thing to see were some of the really cool independent games. There were two games that caught my eye, both of them had really cool game art, music, and sound. Since they are independent games it is hard to make a really large and impressive 3d world. Because of this the best indie games were of the 2d variety.

The first game I’ll mention is Iron dukes which is a game about pirates. From this initial description this game is already awesome. It runs on flash and actually requires you to be running a relatively new computer for it to not slow down to a crawl. Since you can run the game in a web browser, if you wanted to, you yourself could go check it out for free. Below is the picture of my crew during one of the games:

Another really cool game was world of goo. You basically use the goo to construct bridges and structures in order to get to your objective. If you preoder the game for $20 you can get the preview/demo right now while the game finishes development. The goo has a personality and you sort of think of them as you minions.

I should also mention that there was a game in the theme of guitar hero and rock band called guitar rising. Basically in both guitar hero and rock band you get really good at playing a plastic guitar. In guitar rising you learn how to play an actual guitar in a very similar format to guitar hero and rock band. It was pretty cool but also needed some development time (their website says that the release date is late 2008). You of course need a guitar to play the game.