Yeah, yeah, this is the time of year when everyone runs a list of teh most anticipated games of 2011!1 or whatever. Not that I’m above doing what everyone else is doing, but I can guarantee that several of the games I’m about to show you aren’t mentioned on those other lists. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ve either forgotten about or don’t even know about a couple of them.
Does that pique your interest?
After the jump, it’s 12 — well, 13 — games that will make 2011 awesome Continue reading →
“You’re doing what?”
“A game diary. Tom asked me to do a game diary.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Well,” I clear my throat and take another bite of soup, trying not to look like I’m stalling. “Well, I play my way through a game and write about the experience. Taking notes along the way, kind of like I do with movies. We post the bits I write as entries, like journal entries. It’s one of Tom’s ideas for the relaunch.”
As she takes a bite of salad and mulls this over, I get our six-year old boy to eat another green bean and try to gauge my wife’s demeanor. Her suspicious look has not yet emerged —
Oh, I spoke too soon.
After the jump, I bring dishonor to my family. Continue reading →
The game is Starcraft II played in a series of 1v1 matches, with the winner being the first to four victories. The map is Metalopolis, which features four starting positions behind narrow ramps, and two gold mineral expansions in the center. The races are randomly determined, just like real life generals. The players are Tom Chick, ranked 5th in his division in the silver league, and Kelly Wand, who has one of those dragon icons in Warcraft III but hasn’t even played the stupid campaign in Starcraft II.
The score so far: Tom: 0, Kelly: 1
Game two, after the jump Continue reading →
Salman Rushdie likes watching his thirteen-year-old son play Red Dead Redemption. He is intrigued by the idea of a narrative that “goes sideways” instead of from beginning to end and mentions that this kind of narrative is like the idea in Borges Garden of Forking Paths. Games are good, Rushdie says.
Wait — then he goes on to say that games don’t develop intelligence in children and that playing games may erode our attachment to storytelling, leaving open the question as to what that will do to us as humans. As Rushdie says, we are the only story-telling animals on the planet. Games are bad!
There’s a four-minute thirty-nine second clip of Rushdie discussing videogames here at Big Think. Videogames are a central idea in his childrens’ book, Luka and the Fire of Life. Here’s a clip from a NY Times review of the book:
With every heroic task he completes, Luka pushes a button to save his progress, and a new-level number appears in his field of vision. He also gets plenty of extra lives. But while the setting feels like something out of Nintendo, the characters come either from Rushdie’s lively interpretations of mythology or his jovial, limber imagination. A pixelated Fire Bug bursts into “a little cloud of angry, buzzing sparks,” and an army of insult-slinging warriors on flying carpets do battle with a colony of touchy rats.
Gods of Egyptian, Norse, Aztec and Chinese extraction, among others, converge in the final chapters, to stress the diversity of a mythical world eroded by onscreen interfaces. Rushdie isn’t against video games, exactly: Luka’s father cheerily defends them in the novel’s early pages. But the story suggests they are a mythmaker’s chief competition, and Rushdie seems determined to make his book busier than any game, a “supercolossal ultra-exploit.”
How I long for the days when gaming was as simple as being a drunken space marine trying to bag an elvin chick. Now I can’t even play an online game without also helping advance medical science.
ETeRNA is a free online puzzle game about RNA. I will let the NY Times explain:
Designed by some of the same researchers as Foldit, EteRNA is similar in that it is basically a two-dimensional puzzle-solving exercise performed in this case with the four bases — adenine, guanine, uracil and cytosine — that make up RNA molecules. Players can design elaborate structures including knots, lattices and switches. Unlike earlier efforts at crowd-sourced science, EteRNA will cross over from simulation to biology. Each week the best designs created by game players and chosen by the gaming community will be synthesized at Stanford, according to the scientists.
And these gamer-made bits of RNA will lead to this:
“The dream is that within a year or so we will be able to create RNA that is functional and that we can transcribe into cells to do things such as sense light or even deactivate a virus,” said Rhiju Das, a physicist who teaches in the Stanford biochemistry department and who is one of the designers of the game.
The article quotes says researchers think that RNA can be used to build a biological computer someday.
Gamers competing to design RNA that may someday be turned into a biological computer? What could possibly go wrong?
