Game to Grow’s mission is three-fold:
Provide gaming groups for therapeutic, educational, and community growth.
Train others to use game-based interventions to benefit their own communities.
Promote awareness of the life-enriching potential of games across the world.
Признавам си, целенасочено се забих със засилка в тази подтема специално за да видя някой отварял ли е въпроса за DBH.Кал wrote:Detroit: Become Human
От сценариста на Beyond: Two Souls. Макар предишната игра да ме впечатли повече с разнообразието си от теми и ситуации, тази също успя да ме развълнува. С чисто човешките си моменти. (Аз съм свръхкритичен на тема „изкуствен интелект“, така че тук по-скоро приемам андроидите като алегория за хората без права. Ще ми се да вярвам, че създателите на истинските ИИ ще са достатъчно умни, за да предвидят и не допуснат такъв тип идиотско отношение. Като почнат от мисълта, че един робот, който е достатъчно умен да изчисти къщата ни, е твърде умен, за да чисти къщи.)
Очебийните неща, като колко реалистична е визуално, няма да ги коментирам.
По неизвестни причини тежкото фенгърлене ме удари с пълна сила чак сега, на второто преиграване, въпреки че и на първото много се впечатлих. Мааалко съм понамалила децибелите във фенското си писукане, откакто не съм била активна тук, та ще опитам така, по-накратичко да си изразя ентусиазма. (Ей, почти си повярвах...)
)
Отделно вторичните позитиви (неочакван пик в писането, макар и не по проекта, над който трябва да съм съсредоточена 
, и нови любими актьори, които се оказаха изключително зареждащи хора). Отделно новото себепознание - не съм от най-сантименталните, но в тесен кръг признавам без бой на кои сцени точно нанизах и продължавам да нижа по три реда сълзи... Ще я видим таз работа...aleph3 wrote:Mutazione I would say has strongly solarpunk feels:
A mutant soap opera where small-town gossip meets the supernatural. Explore the Mutazione community as Kai as she cares for her ailing grandfather. Discover magical gardens, new friends & old secrets. They can survive an apocalyptic meteor strike, but can they survive their small-town drama?
) 
Ами, те технологичните парадигми съществуват отдавна... още при игри от 90-те. Ама като няма истински R&D в гейминг индустрията, непрекъснато преоткриват "нови" технологии, дето дори не направени както трябва...Кал wrote:(...)Как е възможно да се направи толкова голяма тълпа от NPC – над 1000?
Е... те били 10 000(...)
- on sex and writing (a favorite topic o'mine)As arcades and the Atari VCS grew in popularity over the course of those years, an anti-videogame hysteria grew in response. The Philippines and Singapore banned arcades outright, claiming they “cause aggression, truancy, ‘psychological addictions’ akin to gambling, and encourage stealing money from parents and others to support children’s videogame habits.” Closer to home, the Dallas, Texas, suburb of Mesquite banned children from playing videogames in public without a parent or other adult guardian, prompting a rash of similar bans in small towns across the country that were finally struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1982. Undaunted, Ronald Reagan’s unusually prominent new Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, waded in soon after, saying videogames created “aberration in childhood behavior” and, toting one of the anti-videogame camp’s two favorite lines of argument, claiming again that they addicted children, “body and soul.” Others colorfully if senselessly described videogames as substitutes for “adolescent masturbatory activity,” without clarifying what that deliciously Freudian phrase was supposed to mean or why we should care if it was true.
Favaro labored to replace such poetic language with actual data derived from actual research. His PhD thesis, which he completed and successful defended in late 1983, was entitled The Effects of Computer Video Game Play on Mood, Physiological Arousal, and Psychomotor Performance. One of the first studies of its kind, it found that there was nothing uniquely addictive about videogames. While there were indeed a small number of “maladaptive” children who played videogames to the detriment of their scholastic, social, and familial lives, the same was true of many other childhood activities, from eating sweets and chips to playing basketball. With regard to the other popular anti-videogame argument, that they made children “aggressive,” Favaro found that, while violent videogames did slightly increase aggression immediately after being played, they actually did so less than violent television shows. Also discredited was a favorite claim of the pro-videogame camp, that the games improved hand-eye coordination. Favaro found that playing a videogame for a long period of time made children better at playing other videogames, but had little effect on their motor skills or reflexes in the real world.
+ the examplesThe subject of sex has inspired far more bad writing over the course of history than any ten other topics combined.
+ Dorte’s View: Alter Ego:I’d therefore like to see a modern version of Alter Ego that would try a different approach. Instead of a single author, inevitably blinkered by her experiences and prejudices, I’d like to see a crowd-sourced Alter Ego. People from all over the world, and of all ages, races, genders, and sexualities, would be able to submit their own vignettes reflecting their own lived experiences. The result would be a constantly expanding tapestry of the human experience, accessible to anyone who ever felt an urge to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Rather than flatten the human experience into some idea of the psychologically normal, it would celebrate all of the different ways there are to think and feel and be.
-> PortalConsciousness in a human starts several years after birth, and a lot of people haven’t even learned to understand the consequences of their decisions by the time of their death. So, I had some difficulties relating to the question of do I want to be born now or later. But at the same time, I could enforce my plan of recreating my real life and be born early. Jimmy, on the other hand — and I am not sure how much psychology you should read into this — just didn’t want to come out, trying to push his luck with both his and his mother’s health.
In a Baffler article from 2012, David Graeber, in the process of trying to figure out whatever happened to the flying cars and hotels in space that science fiction once promised us, notes how our most transformative inventions of recent years, the microprocessor and the Internet, are largely used to simulate new realities rather than to create them. Those matinee audiences who watched Buck Rogers serials in packed theaters back in the 1930s wouldn’t be as impressed as we might like to think by a modern film like, say, Interstellar because they thought we’d be out there actually exploring interstellar space by now, not just making ever more elaborate movies about it. It’s become something of a truism of serious science-fiction criticism that science fiction isn’t really about predicting the future, that any given story or novel has more to say about the times in which it was created than the times it depicts within its pages. There’s more than a grain of truth to that idea. But it’s also worth noting that many of the predictions of Jules Verne — predictions which seemed just as outlandish in their day as those of 2001: A Space Odyssey did in theirs and still do in ours — have in fact come true, from submarines to voyages to the Moon.
Whether you claim the failures of more recent science-fictional prognosticators not named William Gibson to be the result of a grand failure of societal ambition and imagination, as Graeber does, or simply a result of a whole pile of technological problems that have proved to be exponentially more difficult than first anticipated, it does sometimes feel to me like we’ve blundered into a postmodern cul-de-sac of the virtualized hyperreal from which we don’t quite know how to escape as we otherwise just continue to go round and round in circles on this crowded little rock of ours. The restlessness or, if you like, malaise that this engenders is becoming more and more a part of the artistic conversation — appropriately, because one of the things art should do is reflect and contemplate the times in which it was created. See, for example, Spike Jonze’s brilliant film Her, which so perfectly evokes the existential emptiness at the heart of our love affair with our gadgets that makes the release of a new Apple phone a major event in many people’s lives. We’ve spent so much time peering down at our screens that we’ve forgotten how to lift our eyes and look to the stars. Already many of us find virtual realities more compelling than our own — and no, the irony of my writing that on a computer-game blog is not lost to me.
Ballyhoo:
-> The entire "monograph" on Trinity, starting here and ending hereO’Neill’s love of abstract wordplay, the theme around which his second and final work of interactive fiction would be built, also pops up in Ballyhoo from time to time. When you find yourself with an irresistible craving for something sweet, for instance, it takes the form of a literal monkey on your back who drives you to the concession stand. O’Neill also toys with the parser and the player sitting behind it to a degree not seen in an Infocom game since The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here’s what happens when you come upon a “piece of wood” that turns out to be a mousetrap:
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>get wood You have just encountered that brief instant of time between the realization that you've caused yourself excruciating Pain and the actual onslaught of such Pain, during which time most people speak with exclamation points and ... well, say things like ... >fuck Easy there! You're jeopardizing our "G" rating. >darn Bravisimo! Once more now, with feeling. >darn Cut! Cut! Okay, that's a wrap.
So can I ....On November 20 [1983] (...), the ABC television network aired a first-run movie called The Day After. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, fresh off the triumph of Star Trek II, it told the story of a nuclear attack on the American heartland of Kansas. If anything, it soft-pedaled the likely results of such an attack; as a disclaimer in the end credits noted, a real attack would likely be so devastating that there wouldn’t be enough people left alive and upright to make a story. Still, it was brutally uncompromising for a program that aired on national television during the family-friendly hours of prime time. Viewed by more than 100 million shocked and horrified people, The Day After became one of the landmark events in American television history and a landmark of social history in its own right. Many of the viewers, myself among them, were children. I can remember having nightmares about nuclear hellfire and radiation sickness for weeks afterward.
- Have you ever felt there's something childlike about the typical American approach?In 1946, not one but two French designers introduced risque new women’s bathing suits that were smaller and more revealing than anything that had come before. Jacques Heim called his the “atome,” or atom, “the world’s smallest bathing suit.” Louis Réard named his the bikini after the recently concluded Operation Crossroads tests at Bikini Atoll. “Like the bomb,” he declared, “the bikini is small and devastating.”
- War may never change (hi, Fallout)--but will our perception of war?(...) the people who worked at the [Nevada Test] site weren’t bad people. They were in fact almost uniformly good friends, good colleagues, good workers who were at the absolute tops of their various fields. Almost any one of them would have made a great, helpful neighbor. Nor, as Operation Plowshare and other projects attest, were they bereft of their own certain brand of idealism. If they sound heartlessly dismissive of the Downwinders’ claims and needlessly contemptuous of environmentalists who fret over the damage their work did and may still be doing, well, it would be hard for any of us to even consider the notion that the work to which we dedicated our lives — work which we thoroughly enjoyed, which made us feel good about ourselves, around which many of our happiest memories revolve — was misguided or downright foolish or may have evenkilled children, for God’s sake. I tend to see the people who worked at the site as embodying the best and the worst qualities of Americans in general, charging forward with optimism and industry and that great American can-do spirit — but perhaps not always thinking enough about just where they’re charging to.
The United States has visited war upon quite a number of nations in recent decades, but the vast majority of Americans have never known war — real war, total war, war as existential struggle — and the mentality it produces. I believe that this weirdly asymmetrical relationship with the subject has warped the way many Americans view war. We insist on trying to make war, the dirtiest business there is, into a sanitized, acceptable thing with our “targeted strikes” and our rhetoric about “liberating” rather than conquering, all whilst wringing our hands appropriately when we learn of “collateral damage” among civilians. Meanwhile we are shocked at the brutal lengths the populations of the countries we invade will go to to defend their homelands, see these lengths as proof of the American moral high ground (an Abu Ghraib here or there aside), while failing to understand that what is to us a far-off exercise in communist control or terrorist prevention is to them a struggle for national and cultural survival. Of course they’re willing to fight dirty, willing to do just about anything to kill us and get us out of their countries.
World War II, however, had no room for weasel words like “collateral damage.” It was that very existential struggle that the United States has thankfully not had to face since. This brought with it an honesty about what war actually is that always seems to be lacking in peacetime. If the conduct of the United States during the war in the Pacific was not quite as horrendous as that of Japan, plenty of things were nevertheless done that our modern eyes would view as atrocities. Throughout the war, American pilots routinely machine-gunned Japanese pilots who had bailed out of their stricken aircraft — trained pilots being far, far more precious a commodity to the Japanese than the planes they flew. And on the night of March 9, 1945, American B-29s loosed an incendiary barrage on Tokyo’s residential areas carefully planned to burn as much of the city as possible to the ground and to kill as many civilians as possible in the process; it managed to kill at least 100,000, considerably more than were killed in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and not far off the pace of Hiroshima. These scenes aren’t what we think of when we think of the Greatest Generation; we prefer a nostalgic Glen Miller soundtrack and lots of artfully billowing flags. Our conception of a World War II hero doesn’t usually allow for the machine-gunning of helpless men or the fire-bombing of civilians. But these things, and much more, were done.
World War II was the last honest war the United States has fought because it was the last to acknowledge, at least tacitly, the reality of what war is: state-sponsored killing. If you’re unlucky enough to lead a nation during wartime, your objective must be to prosecute that war with every means at your disposal, to kill more of your enemy every single day than he kills of your own people. Do this long enough and eventually he will give up. If you have an awesome new weapon to deploy in that task, one which your enemy doesn’t possess and thus cannot use to retaliate in kind, you don’t think twice. You use it. The atomic bomb, the most terrible weapon the world has ever known, was forged in the crucible of the most terrible war the world has ever known. Of course it got used. The atomic bombings of Japan and all of the other terrible deeds committed by American forces in both Europe and the Pacific are not an indictment of Truman or his predecessor Roosevelt or of the United States; they’re an indictment of war. Some wars, like World War II, are sadly necessary to fight. But why on earth would anyone who knows what war really means actually choose to begin one? The collective American denial of the reality of war has enabled a series of elective wars that have turned into ugly, bleeding sores with no clear winners or losers; somehow the United States is able to keep mustering the will to blunder into these things but unable to muster the will to do the ugly things necessary to actually win them.
The only antidote for the brand of insanity that leads us to freely choose war when any other option is on the table is to be forced to stop thinking about it in the abstract, to be confronted with some inkling of the souls we’re about to snuff out and the suffering we’re about to cause. This is one of the services that Trinity does for us. For me, the most moving moment in the entire game is the one sketched out at the beginning of this article, when you meet a sweet little girl who’s about to become a victim of the world’s second atomic-bomb attack. Later — or earlier; chronology is a tricky thing in Trinity — you’ll meet her again, as an old woman, in the Kensington Gardens.
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>examine woman Her face is wrong. You look a little closer and shudder to yourself. The entire left side of her head is scarred with deep red lesions, twisting her oriental features into a hideous mask. She must have been in an accident or something. A strong gust of wind snatches the umbrella out of the old woman's hands and sweeps it into the branches of the tree. The woman circles the tree a few times, gazing helplessly upward. That umbrella obviously means a lot to her, for a wistful tear is running down her cheek. But nobody except you seems to notice her loss. After a few moments, the old woman dries her eyes, gives the tree a vicious little kick and shuffles away down the Lancaster Walk.
In preparation for tonight's talk:
~ Hear me, ye writers! Or better yet, hear Stu Galley from Infocom:Leather Goddesses of Phobos begins with this:
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Some material in this story may not be suitable for children, especially the parts involving sex, which no one should know anything about until reaching the age of eighteen (twenty-one in certain states). This story is also unsuitable for censors, members of the Moral Majority, and anyone else who thinks that sex is dirty rather than fun. The attitudes expressed and language used in this story are representative only of the views of the author, and in no way represent the views of Infocom, Inc. or its employees, many of whom are children, censors, and members of the Moral Majority. (But very few of whom, based on last year's Christmas Party, think that sex is dirty.) By now, all the folks who might be offended by LEATHER GODDESSES OF PHOBOS have whipped their disk out of their drive and, evidence in hand, are indignantly huffing toward their dealer, their lawyer, or their favorite repression-oriented politico. So... Hit the RETURN/ENTER key to begin!
~ On story-driven games (from "On S.D.I. (Just a Little) and King of Chicago (Quite a Lot)":THE IMPLEMENTOR’S CREED
I create fictional worlds. I create experiences.
I am exploring a new medium for telling stories.
My readers should become immersed in the story and forget where they are. They should forget about the keyboard and the screen, forget everything but the experience. My goal is to make the computer invisible.
I want as many people as possible to share these experiences. I want a broad range of fictional worlds, and a broad range of “reading levels.” I can categorize our past works and discover where the range needs filling in. I should also seek to expand the categories to reach every popular taste.
In each of my works, I share a vision with the reader. Only I know exactly what the vision is, so only I can make the final decisions about content and style. But I must seriously consider comments and suggestions from any source, in the hope that they will make the sharing better.
I know what an artist means by saying, “I hope I can finish this work before I ruin it.” Each work-in-progress reaches a point of diminishing returns, where any change is as likely to make it worse as to make it better. My goal is to nurture each work to that point. And to make my best estimate of when it will reach that point.
I can’t create quality work by myself. I rely on other implementors to help me both with technical wizardry and with overcoming the limitations of the medium. I rely on testers to tell me both how to communicate my vision better and where the rough edges of the work need polishing. I rely on marketeers and salespeople to help me share my vision with more readers. I rely on others to handle administrative details so I can concentrate on the vision.
None of my goals is easy. But all are worth hard work. Let no one doubt my dedication to my art.
The story in a storytelling game lies waiting to be discovered — but not written — by you as you make your way through the game. Storytelling games can offer strong, interesting stories, but do so at the expense of player freedom. You generally have local agency only, meaning that you may have some options about the order in which you explore the storyworld and even how you cause events to progress, but you’re nevertheless tightly bound to the overall plot created by the game’s designer. The canonical example of a storytelling game, a perpetual touchstone of scholars from Janet Murray to Chris Crawford, is Infocom’s Planetfall, particularlyStorytelling games are Calvinist in philosophy: free will is just an illusion, your destiny foreordained before you even get started. Still, fixed as their overall plots may be, they allow plenty of space for puzzle solving, independent investigation of the environment, and all those other things we tend to wrap up under the convenient term of “gameplay.” I’m of the opinion that experiencing a story through the eyes of a person who represents you the player, whom you control, can do wonders to immerse you in that story and deepen the impact it has on you. Some folks, however, take the Infocom style of interactive fiction’s explicit promise of an interactivity that turns out to exist only at the most granular level as a betrayal of the medium’s potential. This has led them to chase after an alternative in the form of the storymaking game.Spoiler
the death therein of your poor little robot companion Floyd. Every player who completes Planetfall will have experienced the same basic story. She may have seen that story in a slightly different order than another player and even solved its problems in slightly different ways, but Floyd will always sacrifice himself at the climactic moment, and all of the other major plot events will always play out in the same way.
The idealized storymaking game is one that turns you loose in a robustly simulated storyworld and allows you to create your own story in conjunction with the inhabitants of that world. Unfortunately, it remains an unsolved and possibly unsolvable problem, for we lack a computerized intelligence capable of responding to the player when the scope of action allowed to her includes literally anything she can dream of doing. Since an infinite number of possibilities cannot be anticipated and coded for by a human, the computer would need to be able to improvise on the fly, and that’s not something computers are notably good at doing. If we somehow could find a way around this problem, we’d just ram up against another: stories of any depth almost universally require words to tell, and computers are terrible at generating natural language. In a presentation on King of Chicago for the 1989 Game Developers Conference, Sharp guessed that artificial intelligence would reach a point around 2030 where what he calls “fat and deep,” AI-driven storymaking games would become possible. As of today, though, it doesn’t look like we’ll get there within the next fifteen years. We may never get there at all. Strong AI remains, at it always has, a chimera lurking a few decades out there in some murky future.
That said, there’s a large middle ground between the fixed, unalterable story arc of a Planetfall and the complete freedom of our idealized storymaking game. Somewhere inside that middle ground rests the field of choice-based or hypertext literature, which generally gives the player a great deal of control over where the story goes in comparison to a traditional adventure game of the Infocom stripe, if nothing close to the freedom promised by a true storymaking game. The hypertext author figures out all of the different ways that she is willing to allow the story to go beforehand and then hand-crafts lots and lots of text to correspond with all of her various narrative tributaries. The player still isn’t really making her own story, since she can’t possibly do anything that hasn’t been anticipated by the story’s author. Yet if the choices are varied and interesting enough it almost doesn’t matter.
The adventure game and the hypertext are two very distinct forms; fans of one are by no means guaranteed to be fans of the other. Each is in some sense an exploration of story, but in very different ways. If the adventure game is concerned with the immersive experience of story, the hypertext is concerned with possibilities, with that question we all ask ourselves all the time, even when we know we should know better: what would have happened if I had done something else? The natures of the two forms dictate the ways that we approach them. Most adventure games are long-form works which players are expected to experience just once. Most hypertexts by contrast are written under the assumption that the player will want to engage with them multiple times, making difference choices and exploring the different possible outcomes. This makes up for the fact that the average playthrough of the average hypertext, with its bird’s-eye view of the story, takes a small fraction of the time of the average playthrough of the average adventure game, with its worm’s-eye view.
Според Urban Dictionary означава "vengeance in the most violent way possible". Nice!) 
Кал wrote:Between 2001 and 2003, I studied Computing Science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. I had this classmate Jeff, who was much smarter (and quite a bit older) than all of us. Only after I left Canada did I find out what Jeff Sember had been doing in the 1980s.
For what it's worth, Jeff was one of the nicest, most helpful people I've ever met. I miss him. (Last I heard from him--more than ten years ago--he was headed for a job at Microsoft. Not game-related, I think.)
Knight Orc
In a hole in a mound there lived an orc. Not a clear, dry, sandy hole with only spiders to catch and eat, nor yet a comfortable hobbit hole. It was an orc hole, and that means a dirty, clammy, wet hole filled with bits of worms and a putrid smell.
It had a perfectly round garbage heap, blocking the doorway, with a slimy yellow blob in the exact middle for spitting practice. The doorway opened onto a sewer-shaped hall — a deeply unpleasant tunnel filled with smoke, with secret panels, and floors snared and pitted, provided with treacherous chairs and lots and lots of booby traps — the orc was fond of visitors.
But what is an orc? Orcs are not seen much nowadays, since they are shy of human beings. They are a pungent people, little bigger than overweight elves, with the charisma of blow flies and the appetite of gannets. Orcs have little or no magic, except a rudimentary skill with knives and strangling cords and, in short, they are evil little pits.
This orc was unusually ugly, even for an orc. His name was Grindleguts.
Grindleguts had lived in the neighborhood of The Mountain for about a year and most people considered him two steps lower than a tapeworm, not only because of the smell and the plague, but because he kept eating their household pets.
Accolade's Comics Habitat and the joys of multiplayer online gaming
-> "The 14 Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design"Addiction!
From the bureau of things that never change: some users promptly became addicted, which was a real problem for them given that this was a paid beta test, billed at the usual QuantumLink “premium” rate of $3.60 per hour. Some were soon racking up monthly bills of $200 or more, corresponding to well over 50 hours of play. One managed to hit $1000 in one month, despite warnings sent to his email address at $300 and $600 that he might want to “check out his usage in the billing section.” Horrifying as this was on one level, Lucasfilm and QuantumLink couldn’t help but note that in theory they would only need twenty more users just like him to cover all of their operating expenses and make Habitat profitable.
The One-Percenters
Seeking to make Habitat a believable place, Lucasfilm included richer and poorer areas, discount shops and luxury boutiques with largely the same goods but very different prices. Trouble began when a few players realized that they could actually pawn items in a rich area for more money than it cost to buy them new in a poor. They spent an entire night trekking back and forth, buying low and selling high. By morning they had effectively wrecked Habitat‘s economy, inflating the money supply by a factor of five and making themselves almost inconceivably rich in contrast to everyone else. This nouveau riche began to usurp power for themselves, getting others to do their bidding for trifling (to them) amounts of money, dispensing bread and circuses to the masses in the form of games and treasure hunts. With little outlet for their immense fortunes in spite of all their best efforts to spend them, the superrich ended up establishing a lucrative trade amongst themselves in what became Habitat‘s most ostentatious symbol of conspicuous consumption: custom heads for their avatars.
Robbery! Murder!
Weapons could be purchased in Habitat and player-versus-player conflict was allowed in the so-called “wilderness areas” outside of city limits, although the consequences of “death” were relatively mild: everything the dead avatar was carrying would be dumped onto the ground where she had been standing, and she would then be teleported back to her home turf, once again intact. Of course, it took about five minutes for someone to start randomly shooting people in order to take their stuff. This led to…
Law and Order Must Be Imposed!
The inhabitants decided that a police department must be established, and held elections for sheriff. Inevitably, the guy who won by a landslide was one of the one-percenters, who could afford a campaign on a scale of which the other candidates could only dream. Did someone say something about the role of money in politics?
Christianity Under Siege!
The first virtual church was opened by a Greek Orthodox minister. Those who wanted to join his flock were forbidden from stealing or engaging in any sort of violence. Unfortunately, whenever the minister and his flock weren’t around other players would march in, strip the church bare, and pawn the lot. The minister finally had to appeal directly to Lucasfilm for a special dispensation: a lock for his church.
Family Values
While there is no record of any relationships formed inside Habitat escaping into the real world, there were at least three virtual-world weddings, all taking place in that aforementioned church. Lucasfilm helpfully joined the newlyweds’ turfs together for cohabitation. The first virtual divorce followed the first virtual marriage by just two weeks.
Dangerous Bedfellows
It was possible for players to “sleep over” in other players’ turfs rather than their own, if invited inside. Soon con artists started finagling such invitations from naive players, then logging in while the victim still slept blissfully and absconding with everything in the room.
It’s About Ethics in In-Game Journalism!
A couple of enterprising players founded a newspaper, The Weekly Rant, consisting of as many as fifty pages full of news, fiction, classified advertisements, and announcements (including news of weddings and divorces). Absolutely everyone in Habitat was soon using it as an essential resource until, after a dispute about editorial content — the publisher wanted a shorter newspaper with less fiction — the editor abruptly quit. Habitat felt the loss keenly for all of its remaining days.
Arms Negotiations
For a special area they were creating called “The Dungeon of Death,” two players convinced Lucasfilm to build them special “elephant guns” that could kill another avatar in one shot instead of the usual twelve or so, on the condition that they would use them only in the person of their alter egos “Death” and “The Shadow” who lurked within the dungeon. Embarrassingly, one day while playing Death on loan Randall Farmer himself managed to get himself killed by another player, who promptly scooped up the gun. An ordinary player, unbound by any strictures whatsoever, now had this massively destabilizing weapon in her hot little hands. After threats and negotiations, a deal was struck: 10,000 tokens to buy the gun back. Echoing a thousand Hollywood thrillers, the two parties met on the grounds of Habitat‘s largest public park to make a tense exchange through a neutral intermediary; one can’t help but imagine their respective posses lurking tensely in the bushes all around in case trouble started.
After trying to have his bank update his mailing address for two years, Douglas Adams resorted to this:
-> Call of Cthulu sounds like an early inspiration for Unknown Armies:My address is at the top of this letter. It is also at the top of my previous letter to you. I am not trying to hide anything from you. If you write to me at this address I will reply. If you write to me care of my accountant, he will reply, which would be better still. If you write to me at Highbury New Park, the chances are that I won’t reply because your letter will probably not reach me, because I don’t live there any more. I haven’t lived there for two years. I moved. Two years ago. I wrote to you about it, remember?
Dear Miss Wilcox, I am sure you are a very lovely person, and that if I were to meet you I would feel ashamed at having lost my temper with you in this way. I’m sure it’s not your fault personally and that if I had to do your job I would hate it. Let me take you away from all this. Come to London. Let me show you where I live, so that you can see it is indeed in Upper Street. I will even take you to Highbury New Park and introduce you to the man who has been living there for the past two years so that you can see for yourself that it isn’t me. I could take you out to dinner and slip you little change-of-address cards across the table. We could even get married and go and live in a villa in Spain, though how would we get anyone in your department to understand that we had moved? I enclose a copy of my new book which I hope will cheer you up. Happy Christmas.
-> The Fool's Errand + The Fool and His MoneyGiven the nature of the Mythos, it would be quite the stretch to call Call of Cthulu “non-violent.” Yet it was certainly a different and in its way a more realistic take on violence than had been seen in RPGs before. Violence here is horrifying, as it should be. It’s also swift and deadly and deeply damaging to characters’ psyches as well as their bodies, just as it is in reality. Call of Cthulu feels like a game for grown-ups, a game capable of producing real drama.
And a key point about the (ab)use of violence in narratives:The other inhabitants of the village are described with delightful wit.
He was a dwarf from the gnorth, who measured for pleasure with his pole in a hole and his theodolite on the right.He was the local fishergnome, gnow doubling as the ferrygnome since the Dribble Bridge collapsed. He gnever did much ferrying because he was always busy fishing to supply the Green Gnome, which was crowded with stranded travellers who were waiting for the ferry.He was a travelling leprechaun, who spent his days peddling his charms to housewives everywhere. He was very small, but very jolly, and given to saying that size wasn’t everything.He was the family rabbit-herd. He couldn’t decide if he was keeping rabbits for their meat, milk, or fur, but it didn’t matter anyway because the rabbits wouldn’t let him have any of them.
I should take a moment to note that by “dispatch” I don’t mean kill; no one ever has to die in either of the Gnome Ranger games, something else I like about them. The Austin brothers regarded violent games with a certain contempt, calling them “vomit games” after the squelching sounds of blood and guts. Pete Austin:Most advertising seems to emphasize the violent aspect of games, and, while nobody wants things like My Little Pony prancing about, it would be better to point out that computer programs can be interesting, informative, and broaden the mind. Unfortunately, violence does succeed in selling. If you have an essentially boring concept, the best way to jazz it up is to add some blood. This is what Hollywood has been doing successfully for years, but what you really need is a good script.
Малко след като написах това, добри хора в Дискорда на Solarpunk Magazine ми дадоха техническо решение. (Казва се Lutris.) Подкарах играта, минах първия ден от историята... и спрях.Кал wrote:Mutazione явно няма да тръгне на моя Debian, въпреки героичните опити на техническия ѝ екип.
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On Solarpunk Magazine's Discord, Кал wrote:After @alxd (he/them) helped me with starting Mutazione on Linux, I'm currently playing it ... as a way to cope with grief. (I'm about to lose one of my best friends and spiritual dads.) The interactions between the MC and her grandfather relate to some of the things I wished to tell my friend when his mind and hearing worked fine. The shamanic elements help me prepare for the transition. And all the other relationships strike pretty close to what I've gone through or witnessed around me over the years.
-> the overview/postmortem of commercial interactive fiction in "Moving to California"In “The Seventh Sally,” a story by the great Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, a god-like “constructor” named Trurl comes upon a former tyrant named Excelsius, now exiled to a lonely asteroid by the peoples of the planets he used to terrorize. Upon learning of Trurl’s powers, Excelsius demands that he restore him to his throne. Trurl, however, is wise enough to consider what suffering Excelsius’s reinstatement would bring to his subjects. So, he instead fashions an intricate simulacrum of a kingdom for Excelsius to rule over.
When first published in 1965, Lem’s tale was the most purely speculative of speculative fictions, set as it was thousands if not millions of years in the future. Yet it would take just another quarter of a century before real-world Excelsiuses got the chance to play with little boxed kingdoms of their own, nurturing their subjects and tormenting them as the mood struck.And all of this, connected, mounted, and ground to precision, fit into a box, and not a very large box, but just the size that could be carried about with ease. This Trurl presented to Excelsius, to rule and have dominion over forever; but first he showed him where the input and output of his brand-new kingdom were, and how to program wars, quell rebellions, exact tribute, collect taxes, and also instructed him in the critical points and transition states of that microminiaturized society — in other words the maxima and minima of palace coups and revolutions — and explained everything so well that the king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions and, without hesitation, while the constructor watched, issued a few trial proclamations, correctly manipulating the control knobs, which were carved with imperial eagles and regal lions. These proclamations declared a state of emergency, martial law, a curfew, and a special levy. After a year had passed in the kingdom, which amounted to hardly a minute for Trurl and the king, by an act of the greatest magnanimity — that is, by a flick of the finger at the controls — the king abolished one death penalty, lightened the levy, and deigned to annul the state of emergency, whereupon a tumultuous cry of gratitude, like the squeaking of tiny mice lifted by their tails, rose up from the box, and through its curved glass cover one could see, on the dusty highways and along the banks of lazy rivers that reflected the fluffy clouds, the people rejoicing and praising the great and unsurpassed benevolence of their sovereign lord.
And so, though at first he had felt insulted by Trurl’s gift, in that the kingdom was too small and very like a child’s toy, the monarch saw that the thick glass lid made everything inside seem large; perhaps too he dully understood that size was not what mattered here, for government is not measured in meters and kilograms, and emotions are somehow the same, whether experienced by giants or dwarfs — and so he thanked the constructor, if somewhat stiffly. Who knows, he might even have liked to order him thrown in chains and tortured to death, just to be safe — that would have been a sure way of nipping in the bud any gossip about how some common vagabond tinkerer presented a mighty monarch with a kingdom. Excelsius was sensible enough, however, to see that this was out of the question, owing to a very fundamental disproportion, for fleas could sooner take their host into captivity than the king’s army seize Trurl. So with another cold nod, he stuck his orb and scepter under his arm, lifted the box kingdom with a grunt, and took it to his humble hut of exile. And as blazing day alternated with murky night outside, according to the rhythm of the asteroid’s rotation, the king, who was acknowledged by his subjects as the greatest in the world, diligently reigned, bidding this, forbidding that, beheading, rewarding — in all these ways incessantly spurring his little ones on to perfect fealty and worship of the throne.
Timothy Leary's involvement in Neuromancer (the game) Аз лично бях повече изненадан да разбера, че Sid Meier е бил лидер на банда балтиморски пирати.Кал wrote:
Server shutdowns and game shutdowns will never cease infuriating me. Tribes: Ascend and Hawken were both games I absolutely loved that are now effectively lost to time solely because the publishers just didn't think there was money in it. Hell, at least Hawken has the Revive community desperately hacking apart an alpha release of the game with the hopes of making some sort of ramshackle, mostly playable community version, but if the publishers hadn't shut down the PC servers, they wouldn't need to break their backs desperately trying to make a slightly playable alpha version available to other fans.
The only reason there is for not providing fans with an offline playable version of a game after a server shutdown - or at least just throwing the source code at fans and fucking off - is greed. "If we can't make money, you can't have it".
Tl;dr: I will never not be mad.
As a rule, companies tend to become malicious (aka hostile to their customers) as soon as they go public. Their "customers" turn into a resource, which they proceed to strip mine and clear cut. You're a bit late in realizing this, as it's been increasingly obvious for the better part of two decades now, but better late than never. And yes, this means that all social contracts involving these companies are void, and actions like piracy are simply a matter of how much risk you want to expose yourself to. The moral question was answered a long time ago.
The sad thing about this whole ubisoft coverage is that I can literally envision exactly how it's gonna go. There will be some Ubisoft pr statement, they'll graciously announce that Assassin's Creed Liberation will not be shut down and that they won't destroy the game you bought with your hard earned money (how nice of them), people will see this as a victory for gamers, and then everyone will completely move on. Then in like a couple years ubisoft will silently continue with the shutdown and not a single peep will be heard about it or any other shutdown.
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You're jaded but with good reason. We collectively don't have the attention span any more. Too much shit happening we have to worry about. Rent, reproductive rights, prices, war in Ukraine, global warming and that's before we get to less mainstream stuff like games being shut down which I think is really shitty. Most people don't even care. And you're right, they'll get some statement on an easy feel good response, we'll somehow call that a win, and they won't change
^^^We could easily be seeing the beginning of a digital dark age. We have a shift in consumer culture towards on-demand media and disposable hardware. We have software and data becoming more and more encased in layers of security, complexity, abstraction and platform dependence. Finally, we have an increased acceptance of digital media as half-baked "experiences" rather than finished works you can interact with from start to end in perpetuity.
It's all starting to coalesce, and the rate at which we're losing art to the march of time is going to increase. Eventually we'll have created a system that births and kills mass amounts of games, music, movies and even literature completely on its own, like a well-oiled machine.
There's entire websites gone because they were hosted in Flash. And for those that have survived or been archived, unless you have an old machine with an install of Internet Explorer 8/9 and a Flash version below 16 you won't be able to view them because emulators like Ruffle don't work for cross-coded languages such as mixtures of ActionScript3 and CSS.
Hell, we lost a good chunk of the Wii's WiiShop content along with the 3DS's online shop content simply because Nintendo didn't care. They weren't first party titles so they saw no reason to archive them the same way they did with everything we saw in the April of 2020 leak. Some of those Wii and 3DS games never got locally dumped and are gone forever.
Legal control, information control, game control, market control... everything is monitored and kept under control. When the Internet is under total control, infringements become routine.
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The anonymity of the internet is also dying, with every other website now arbitrarily demanding your phone number, and major pushes to require personal data.
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Tell as many people as you can about temporary e-mail generators and temporary VoiP services. The websites asking for that information can't check to see if they're valid because there's too many possibilities, so all you're doing is wasting their time.
The other solution is to use their own public facing APIs against them so you never need accounts, such as Nitter or Kavin. Most FOSS followers hate these closed environments so much that they make trawlers for them so you never even have to interact with the original site, at least on desktop.
My guess is this mirrors the coverage of Right to Repair that is being pushed currently. Game Journalists are seeing that these stories do very well (drive a lot of engagement) and may see this topic as being mirrored. Right to Repair has been taken off really in the last year.
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Thanks Louis Rossman.
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Yeah I've watched some videos on his channel, but I'm confused on if it's been successful or not, since some sound like victories and some sound like politicians sandbagging everything at the last minute. I like his videos on how it seems like NYC must be paved with gold considering the pricing there.
Regarding why journalists didn't used to report much on this: I think your assumption on them not wanting to rock the boat and get blacklisted by big publishers is the most likely explanation. Publishers have gotten individual journalists fired for not praising their game before (I'm thinking that guy who got fired from Gamespot for bashing Kane and Lynch).
Regarding why this is suddenly big news now, I think it's a combination of factors.
1. Single player games getting delisted is nothing new, but the implication that AC liberation won't be playable at all even for those who already bought it struck a nerve. Even though Ubisoft backtracked, the damage was already done
2. The remastered version cannot be bought separately, it has to be bought as part of AC3 remastered, so that probably pissed people off
3. AC liberation was massively discounted only recently during the steam sale. A lot of people bought it without any knowledge that it might be rendered unplayable so soon, therefore it felt like a massive scam
4. On that previous point, I have a feeling a lot of people saw this situation as too similar to an NFT style rug-pull
5. Something very similar is happening right now with Sony regarding movies bought on their service. Not sure if you're aware of this but in Germany and Austria, movies from a particular publishing studio will be rendered unwatchable EVEN IF you already bought and downloaded it. This timing was coincidental but I think it raised a bunch of red flags
Keep in mind the gaming community have been complaining about loot boxes for YEARS before Battlefront 2 finally got regulators involved.
^^^Never forget that the entertainment industry tried to create a DVD standard that would literally destroy itself a few hours after play. "Killing" games isn't an accident, it's a wet dream. In the industry's eyes, every old game people can still play is "stealing" money from a new game they could be forced to buy instead. Keeping people on a perpetual treadmill of buying games that self-destruct in a few years and force them to buy new ones is a business model other industries can only dream of (though Apple is trying its hardest.)
Something that worries me about the matter is, the newer generation is slowly taught to not care about the matter, because since day 0, they were grown on an ambient were nothing had a sense of ownership.
It started with microtransactions and games as a service on mobile, and now as you pointed out, even game developers aren't aware that there was a time that majority of the games weren't made as a time bomb, and if they were the outrage was massive. As time passes and people comes in, they are taught that this is the norm, thus makes it harder for them to grasp why preserving a game is important, when we have models that each month introduces a new hoster of dead data for you to lust on, and more and more this dead data is being treated the same way as a physical good that isn't available to everyone and arbitrarily shouldn't.
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As a gen z i can attest. Alot of us have never known anything different.
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never forget horse armor. that was quite literally the day that art died forever.Spoiler
(Бел. ред. - Това е the infamous first-ever Downloadable Content - сега съкратен само до DLC - направен за играта The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, където за една пиклива броня за коня искаха 6 долара (през 2006-а година); отделно - това вече личен pet peeve, ама все пак - дразни ме факта, че DLC като кураво трибуквие измести някогашния термин Expansion Pack - малко както в днешно време никой не казва program, всичко е "app". )
By the way, absolute entry level journalist education is that if you're making a "some people say" argument, you must immediately define who. There's a reason wikipedia has a specific framework for disputing and removing "some people say...". The same principle underpins journalism. If you cannot define who exactly believes something, then you are the one who is saying it. While you may be able to pull the rug out from casual readers, anyone critically reading what you release will always take "some people say" as "I, the writer of this piece, am including this for my own personal reasons". Which, to be clear, is somewhat normal. Even outside opinion pieces journalists are picking and choosing what goes into their piece. Difference is, you have to justify every single element you add into a piece and defend it. "Some people say" is not a justification or foundation for defense.
The author of Love Hina just got elected to parliament in Japan on an anti-censorship and media and games preservation campaign. He said that keeping old games functional is something important to him and wants to look at legal changes to make it easier. Perhaps a new ally in your fight to STOP KILLING GAMES?
Oh my god Ross. I need to quickly rant.
Ever since this news got big; I have seen so many fucking people saying "wow, if this is true this is really bad!" And "Wow could you imagine if companies started doing this?"
Whilst I feel like I'm one of the people who knows that Soylent green is people and I'm trying to stop them from eating it; but no one will listen.
"This has been happening for years!!"
"What do you mean?"
"Darkspore! EA killed Darkspore!"
"Whats that?"
"It's a game that you literally can no longer play! IN ANY FORM! Imagine what Ubisoft is doing but instead of removing it from Steam it's removed from EVERYTHING!"
"Uh, can't you see we are talking about Ubisoft right now? No one knows or cares about Darkspore"
"It's not just Darkspore! There are tons of games that are being killed and you will NEVER get to play!"
"Dude! Did you hear? The new Skate is a [Game as a service]! Isn't that great?"
"AAAAAAAAGGGHHH!!!!"
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I have to wonder sometimes.
If the choice is between malicious or stupid, doesn't it really matter which if the outcome is the same?
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To make a bit of a rhyme that outlines the difference -- Maliciousness can be negated. Stupidity must be ablated.
Maliciousness is active and can be reacted to and stopped because it's a conscious decision with a definitive end goal. Stupidity and apathy born from ignorance cannot be reacted to. It must be prevented from occurring in the first place, and if it's not, has to be actively fought against because it's passive and permeates without effort or an end goal.
I'm really hoping Ken Akamatsu's election over in Japan starts the ball rolling on some form of official game preservation or even criminal persecution against companies who engage in games as fraud. If you don't know who he is, the short answer is he's a famous manga artist who ran for a seat in the Japanese government on a platform of, basically, "creative freedom, no exceptions." One of the first things he did in office was establish a task force to preserve games in a playable state. We'll see what comes of it, but I think it's at least hopeful sign for the future.
Потвърждавам. Още 2012-а бях в шок, че Diablo 3 (един от многото примери) е always online, дори в сингълплейър и се дивях как хората се връзват на такава щуротия. Ех...What's the worst part is that I amd a whole bunch of others predicted EXACTLY THIS when Ubitrash first started forcing signing into their trash servers for single player games, and we were called 'paranoid'.
И едно последно техническо включване и приключвам - постът стана километричен:Me: expecting a teardown of corporate destruction of gaming history
What I got: a teardown of modern journalistic practices and how mass media can influence the public whether intentional by the CIA or otherwise.
Oh, Ross, don't ever change ^_^
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Classic Ross.
"Is the CIA controlling games journalists and manipulating the gaming industry?
I don't know... Maybe.
And here's reasons why."
One small correction because it might shed some light on why old multiplayer titles (sort of) still work.
I recently finished developing a small, free, multiplayer game. We mostly did it to say we did and familiarize ourselves with releasing on major platforms. One thing I tried my damn hardest to do was to make networking work without any external services. Because of how modern networking infrastructure is set up, we couldn't reliably connect two people, even with the technical know-how to do all of the port forwarding correctly. Now, that's not to say that it's actually impossible - I could make it work when I purchased a second router, put my modem into bridge mode, and configured the new router precisely. Sure, it always worked fine over LAN, but that's not what we needed. The best, least intrusive, solution we could find was to use a third-party NAT punchthrough service, which wouldn't have been necessary 15 to 30 years ago. We've still decoupled ourselves from third-party matchmaking services or anything like that, but that's more to keep the recurring costs minimal on our free game.
So taking into account the technical barriers introduced by modern, standard, security that ISPs don't particularly want their users to bypass easily - it becomes tricky to make those direct connections work smoothly enough for the average player. There are strategy games around 20 years old that I was still playing with friends online up to about ten years ago, this is true, but lately we've had to go through fan-made third party solutions to make those same games connect if we aren't on LAN - the same problem I had developing a game from scratch.
I've got an end-of-life plan to strip the third-party stuff out, but it will render the game unplayable for most people. Sigh. At that point, I'd definitely de-list it from major storefronts, maybe keeping a single drm-free archive copy available.
And beyond all of the technical stuff, AAA games, and even AA games, are expected to have seamless connectivity these days. They all have to work with each service's built-in tools for inviting your friends to play games, they need to have no-input matchmaking, and all sorts of convenience features that fundamentally tether a lot of networking solutions to many parties (or services that you have to maintain yourself) that could all kill a game when it becomes impossible to maintain for financial or practical reasons.
Now, I don't want people to think that large companies are off the hook; they should absolutely have an end-of-life switch built into a game to produce a build that's drm-free and configurable so that you can connect to user-hosted servers, or direct-connect, or whatever makes sense to preserve the game. I think that this may be an impossible dream to chase unless we can make it legally required though. We're talking about teams that are crunching to death and don't have the resources to fix all of their networking bugs - I don't see them having code that's in a position to be decoupled from other services.
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These days us indie developers rely on open source APIs that handle the nuts and bolts, or paid APIs that do the same thing. Most commercial engines, for example, have their own built-in networking solutions. Still though, you have to design the logic appropriately to ensure that you don't expose the client to any vulnerabilities over the connection, and minimize the possibility that someone can cheat with client-side scripts. You often write custom predictive code to predict where the player is going so that there's less apparent latency and stuff like that.
If you wanted to be a network engineer, that involves a lot more math and knowledge of the underlying protocols though. You'd be developing the API that the rest of us use to make the game run.