complexmath

Pretty much every game teaches skills that are generally useful in real life. I also haven't seen anyone mention games specifically designed for teaching. America's Army is an obvious example, as it's a FPS intended to teach various basic skills to soldiers. But then there are simulators of various kinds, etc. And that's just in the video game realm. If we expand the definition to be games in general, a huge percentage of learning is gamified because games are an effective learning tool. In medical school there are games involving diagnosing patients, for example. In addition to the interview with Lizzie Stark that I posted a thread or two ago in this forum, there's an interview with Jason Morningstar in the same series where he talks about games he's developed as teaching tools for the medical industry.

Cinnamon apple pancakes, buttered in the pan, maple syrup, and bacon. And coffee I roasted last night. Breakfast is the best.

Regarding The Witness, I think part of the issue for me is misplaced expectations based on the presentation of the game. On the surface, The Witness is very much reminiscent of Myst--a large fantastical space filled with puzzles. The implication, at least to me, is that there's some hidden meaning to uncover; some underlying message. However, I think the fact of The Witness is that there is no underlying meaning. It's simply a large space filled with puzzles, and the space exists to serve two purposes: to provide the player with the enjoyment of discovering the puzzles, and to provide the opportunity for greater diversity in terms of puzzle design (audio puzzles, puzzles that key on environmental cues, etc). This is cool, but because of my prior experience with games like Myst, The Witness ended up feeling like a weirdly empty experience. I expected a hidden message and so wanted a hidden message and when I realized that it was just puzzles for the sake of puzzles my interest waned, despite my really enjoying puzzle games in general. Coming from Braid, which was practically dripping with meaning, this took me by surprise. And while I should have been pleasantly surprised because I hated Braid specifically because of the message built into every atom of the game, the dissonance between my expectations and reality turned out to be a problem. I did want to mention one thing regarding games and mental health, which is Lone Survivor. My impression on playing the game was that it's about schizophrenia. The main character has psychotic episodes throughout the game, and you're left exploring a world where you have no idea what's real and what's not. I don't know that the game is explicitly about this, however, because of the misnamed "schizophrenic" achievement. Like the author, or at least whoever created that achievement, doesn't seem to understand what schizophrenia is about. I'm curious to hear if others have played this game and what they inferred about its meaning. Assuming I'm right about the topic, I think the game is a really interesting if fantastical exploration into a facet of mental health that is often horribly misrepresented in video games.

The potential for cheating was apparently terrible during the beta. All data is supplied by the client and was not checked by the server. Boosting run speed to "so fast they're invisible" levels and giving unlimited ammo was apparently trivial. In a statement released following the final closed beta, Ubi acknowledged the issue and said they'll be addressing it for launch. I've heard they'll be using FairFight on the server side to deal with this. Still, this could make or break the Dark Zone, so I really hope it gets sorted out effectively.

I *think* the game ends if you make it 10 miles. Which is part of why it's often compared to FTL. I think in order to succeed you pretty much have to play through multiple times though, and strategically move items to your dog so they will be available on the next playthrough. From the times I've played so far, I honestly don't see being able to craft a good portion of the stuff without doing this.

I'm guessing it will be DZ and NG+ options, though, given the map they've announced, it would be really cool if they added Central Park as a PvM endgame area.

I think programming is a creative industry in that it's sufficiently young that standard engineering practices haven't been formed around it yet. Despite its commercial utility, programming is still very much a craft. Like blacksmithing.

The new Keeno album came out about a week ago. If you like the genre it's extremely well done, and the mix set on the album is one of the best I've heard.

Being a programmer is weird though because of the push towards open source. It's the most economically polarized creative industry I'm aware of.

First, I suggest getting over your feelings of obligation to your current position. Particularly since you haven't been there for very long. Once you're sure you want to accept the offer, I'd schedule a 1-on-1 with your boss and talk to them about it. Thank them for the opportunity and explain that this is something you simply can't pass up. Don't go into detail, but let them know that this was an unexpected offer and it's a significant career move for you. They may be disappointed and maybe even a bit angry, but I'm sure they'll understand. Just be prepared to be asked to walk right then and there. How things are handled once you say you're going to leave varies widely from situation to situation.

Okay, two more comments on later bits of the cast. First, regarding Austin's comment on how tabletop gaming lets you define the parameters of play. Even moreso than tabletop gaming, I've recently learned that LARP is fantastic for this. It's not just people camping out in the woods and hitting people with swords. Oh no. There are short-form topical LARPs made for small groups which deal with some heavy subjects. I guess the most common touchpoint would be like workplace sensitivity training, but it's an entire subgenre of LARP and is really really interesting. To that end, I strongly recommend a recent interview with Lizzie Stark on the subject. She literally wrote the book on LARP, and, among other things, is in the process of playtesting a LARP on situations surrounding having the BRCA1 cancer gene. Listen to the interview. You know you want to. Second, meals in theaters! I used to live a few blocks from the "Big Heart" Video Cafe in San Francisco. This was basically a diner cinema. Booths all through and a big screen at one end of the eating area. If you're solitary and stay up late, it was the best place in the world. So long, Big Heart Cafe. I really miss you.

The (commercial) world-wide web didn't exist until... 1994, I believe? Before that there was a law preventing commercial use of the internet, so while there were a few websites, it was all academic stuff. At the same time, I think "Mondo 2000" typified the forefront of hacker thought. And you're right, it was sort of a weird overlap of rave culture, shamanism (Terrence McKenna, for example, though this had ties back to rave culture anyway), teen angst (2600 magazine was still very much a thing), and some really nerdy drive to make all these ideas reality. Jaron Lanier was like the avatar of the tech movement. Since the web wasn't really a thing yet, Gibson's vision of the internet ala. Neuromancer was still very much a goal. People were hacking Nintendo Power Gloves to give them a VR interface on the cheap, and in the mid-late 90s a lot of people thought VRML was going to take over the world. At the same time, I think people who had actually seriously used all this stuff mostly realized it wasn't nearly there yet, but that didn't seem to stifle anyone's enthusiasm. It was an interesting time to be in tech. Oh, as a random bit of trivia, in the late 90s the NYC club The Tunnel had a skateboard ramp in it. It was a real actual thing.

That's definitely preferable, though it can be intimidating to go ask for matches against humans.

People seem really polarized on XCOM2 so far. I've yet to listen to the 3MA analysis, but one comparison I think fits is Left 4 Dead. In the transition from L4D1 to L4D2, the team looked at the strategies that guaranteed an easy win and created enemies to specifically defeat them. Turtling was super effective, for example, so they added the Spitter. I think Firaxis did the same thing with XCOM, but in terms of game design as a whole. The game really excels at keeping you off balance, both at the strategic and the tactical level. Every choice is a hard one, and no strategy guarantees success. Turtling? There are snakes and Sectoids. Too aggressive? Faceless, etc. Want to take things slowly at the strategic level? Hey, there's a countdown timer. I know some people really don't like the timers, but fortunately there are already mods on the Steam Workshop to extend and disable them. There's also a mod that re-seeds the RNG at load time so you can save-scum if you want to. I think it's appropriate to evaluate this game from a review perspective as vanilla, but when deciding if this is a game you want to play, I'd also see if there are mods that fix the issues you expect you'll have.

If you beat the AI you wouldn't learn anything. That the AI is actually good now means that you can try different things and see how it responds. For learning though, I'd pick up a program like SmartGo, work through problems, and play 9x9 games with the AI. The problems in SmartGo are ranked by difficulty and I think do a good job of teaching basics all the way up to a competitive level. It doesn't even burn up the CPU any more trying to come up with a good response for a move either, so if you're using a battery-powered device you'll get hours of play time in. Heck, I have it on my phone.

Oh hey, if Flash Boys sounded interesting but you aren't ready to commit to a book, the NY Times Magazine had an article on it a while back that's kind of the book in miniature. It's a fascinating read. On oldschool trading in general... if you want to witness the colored blazers and people yelling at each other, the Chicago Board of Trade is the last holdout in the US. Most of the floors were shut down just last year, but a few remain open. So if you find yourself in Chicago, give it a visit because they'll all be gone before long.

That's a really good point. I'll give this another shot.

Ugh... so for the most part this game is really well done, but some tutorial progressions make leaps in complexity that aren't communicated at all well by the preceding puzzles.

To be fair, a lot of my issue with Braid was that the story subverted the core objective of the game. You're supposed to do the tropey thing and save the girl, then surprise! you're not actually saving the girl, you're the bad guy! What a twist! But that twist was obvious from the opening cinematic, and so I felt that by playing at all I was actually doing the wrong thing. Since the story in The Witness seems to be entirely orthogonal to the gameplay, I don't foresee myself having as much of a problem with it this time around. [edit] Okay so this is a pretty great game so far. Top moment--walking away from the computer and thirty seconds later my 5 year old cheers. Turns out she solved a puzzle by herself.

It's good to hear that the "deeper meaning" in The Witness is more subtle than in Braid. I *loathed* Braid because of how heavy-handed the message was right from the opening cinematic. It was a real War Games moment for me. "Wow, my character is a total dick. I guess the way to truly save the girl is to quit the game now?" I didn't get more than 15 minutes into the game before uninstalling it. That said... despite my conviction that I wouldn't do so I just picked up The Witness. I really really like puzzle games, and Danielle's travails with this game have really warmed me to the idea of playing, for whatever crazy reason. If I can do this and also skip the parts where JB lectures me on highschool-level philosophy and morality I expect I'll have a fun time.

I think some of it may be the art style. Specifically, how the world presents as having very little visual depth. Generally I'm fine so long as the FOV is at 100 and all the blurring effects (motion blur, depth of field) are disabled. Any time the game takes away control of the camera (head bob, looking down when vaulting over a barrier, etc) can be a problem as well, though it's a tad situational and somewhat a matter of degree. I play tons of Battlefield, for example, and it does do some of these things, but only to a small degree, and the game doesn't bother me at all. If I figure out the magic formula I'll let you all know.

So I finally found some time to play the game. Well, start it anyway. Awesome that there's a checkbox for head-bob and motion blur. However, I haven't yet figured out how to remap keys. Don't get me wrong--the menu is there. But you aren't allowed to remap something to a key that's already mapped to some other command. And a surprising number of keys are mapped. So to remap the WASD keys to use ESDF I feel like I'll need to spend 30 minutes or so playing a towers of hanoi-like game with key mapping. Worse, I checked the keymapping config file and it's binary, so I can't edit things that way either. So... I'll keep poking at it I guess. Worst case I'll use a gamepad, but my brain doesn't terribly like that for first-person games. Onwards and upwards. [edit] Okay, sorted. I mapped everything to the right side of the keyboard and then moved it back. That was easier than I expected. [edit the 2nd] Whelp, my brain hates it. I'll continue to experiment with FOV to see if I can improve things. But something about the perspective doesn't sit well with me, and even with head-bob disabled the game likes to make you look at your hands while they do stuff, which is bad news. 30 seconds into the first-person part and I already have a headache and feel a tad nauseous. This may have to be a PS4 game or something.

Something in the discussion of The Division got me thinking about The Maze Runner. The first book is just this crazy scenario where you're trying to figure out what's going on, but as the series progresses it develops into an apocalypse story. More interesting however is the prequel that was release a few years ago: The Kill Order, which starts at the very beginning of the apocalypse and gets to the point where they future is pretty well set. This is the kind of apocalypse story I find most interesting. The one where things start out okay, and then things start to fall apart as people desperately try to cope with society crumbling around them. Anyway, great conversation. And if you're looking for a few nights of entertaining reading, the series isn't half bad. [edit] On the subject of whether video games should be fun vs. interesting... I think we have to move past a point where video games are considered entertainment to a point where we recognize that video games are actually a medium. With this in mind, I think it's important to note that, as a medium, what's effective in video games is different from what's effective in movies or books. It's still fairly common to make video games into basically movies, to their detriment, but part of that may be because we haven't seen the Citizen Kane of video games yet. The techniques are still being developed. Also, like books and movies, video games as a medium means that hey, they don't all have to be fun and that's fine. The can be designed to evoke certain emotions, even negative ones, to make the player think, or even to learn about a subject. How do you objectively score a Hitchcock film vs. a highschool driver's ed. video vs. a war documentary vs. Terminator 2?

Personally, so long as this game doesn't give me motion sickness I'm good. And to that end, every game needs a configurable FOV and the ability to disable head-bob, depth of field, and motion blur, at the very least. Indy games have been pretty good about this in general, though Ethan Carter was like a vomit factory.

Wait, what? Seriously? Wow and here I was wondering why the resource cost was so high. I'm a lot closer than I thought to outfitting my team then.