Tag: games

Minecraft And Luck

Notch’s luck was that he came across the idea of doing a first-person fortress building game. His alignment was that the game that he wanted to make was culturally connected to his tribe. While the game may appear ugly, and its purchase process etc seem naive to many a gaming professional, all of those decisions that Notch made along the road to releasing his game were from the point of view of a particular perspective of what games are, what matters and what were the things that he could trust the tribe to figure out for themselves.

why is minecraft such a hit?

OnLive

a couple days ago OnLive announced a price drop for CES – $66 for the system, plus a free game. I couldn’t resist any more. For the price of a new XBox game, I could get a whole new gaming system which my brain still says should be impossible. Bargain! Despite the fact that I already have an XBox and a Wii, and barely any free time to play either of them, I handed over my credit card info and got the system in yesterday. It’s amazing. The system itself isn’t much bigger than a Roku box or an Apple TV box (though heavier). I mean, it’s *tiny*. OnLive need to put pics of the box next to some pencils or something on their website, because even though I saw its size compared to the controller, I just mentally enlarged it to the size of an XBox or PS3. It’s half the size of a Wii, if not tinier.

a streaming game console.

Computer Chess

  1. People enjoy watching a live internet human vs. human game more, when they can watch a computer judging the human moves and evaluating the position.
  2. Few people enjoy watching live computer vs. computer games, even though the quality of play is much higher and the likelihood of a complex, wild position is much higher. Even if you care at all, there is little in-progress suspense; you might as well look back at the moves once they are over. How many other activities would we enjoy watching or experiencing less if they were done by computers?
  3. The quality of play in a computer vs. computer game is so high it is often difficult for humans to tell where the losing computer went wrong, even if the spectator human has the help of a chess-playing computer.
  4. I find only the very best computer (Rybka) of interest, although I do not feel the same way about the human players. Furthermore the 5th best computer is still much better than the best human players.
  5. The notion of a computer chess tournament taking place “in time” is an odd one. You can play all the games back-to-back or simply use multiple copies of the programs and finish the entire tournament in a few hours; see #2.
  6. Watching a computer play chess is a window onto a world where, once the opening is past, there are many fewer presuppositions than what a human mind will bring to bear on the problem. It’s a very good way of learning, in convincing form, how much your intuitions lead you astray. It’s not just your “bad moves” which cause you to lose, it’s also the moves which still seem pretty good to you.
  7. There are nonetheless many computer moves which I simply cannot believe are any good. It does seem that every now and then computers get stuck in a “dogmatic trap,” usually because of their limited time horizons for evaluation. Playing against a computer, you will do best in the early middle game and then progressively fall apart as its combinatorial powers destroy you.

computer chess is now on such a high level that humans have difficulty analyzing the games.

Synergon

Synergon is a BLARP: a business live-action role-playing game. Players create fantasy characters who start out as low-level corporate drones and then perform boring, soul-destroying repetitive tasks set by a game-master (called “The Boss”) until they level up. Players also fight one another for the chance to do more boring, soul-destroying tasks.

Loebner 2010

When the scores are tallied, Suzette ties with Rollo Carpenter’s Cleverbot for 2nd-3rd. Yet, it turns out, the 3rd round judge got the human subject from hell. Poetic justice! The human was all over the place — confusing, vague. The judge voted irritated/angry/bored Suzette as human. Instant win since no other program swayed the judges.

heh, the first domino in the turing test falls.

Foldit

Today’s issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list. Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is… an online gaming community. Scientists have turned to games for a variety of reasons, having studied virtual epidemics and tracked online communities and behavior, or simply used games to drum up excitement for the science. But this may be the first time that the gamers played an active role in producing the results, having solved problems in protein structure through the Foldit game.

or more accurately, a combined approach leads to the best results.