Tag: games

Daemon

Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer–the architect behind 6 popular online games. His premature death from brain cancer depressed both gamers and his company’s stock price. But Sobol’s fans weren’t the only ones to note his passing. He left behind something that was scanning Internet obituaries, too–something that put in motion a whole series of programs upon his death. Programs that moved money. Programs that recruited people. Programs that killed.

Confronted with a killer from beyond the grave, Detective Peter Sebeck comes face-to-face with the full implications of our increasingly complex and interconnected world–one where the dead can read headlines, steal identities, and carry out far-reaching plans without fear of retribution. Sebeck must find a way to stop Sobol’s web of programs–his Daemon–before it achieves its ultimate purpose. And to do so, he must uncover what that purpose is . .

a shelley for our times?

Soul of The Sims

This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997. I had just started working at the Maxis Core Technology Group on “Project X” aka “Dollhouse”, and Will Wright brought this code in one morning, to demonstrate his design for the motives, feedback loop and failure conditions of the simulated people. While going through old papers, I ran across this print-out that I had saved, so I scanned it and cleaned the images up, and got permission from Will to publish it. This code is a interesting example of game design, programming and prototyping techniques. The Sims code has certainly changed a lot since Will wrote this original prototype code. For example, there is no longer any “stress” motive. And the game doesn’t store motives in global variables, of course. My hope is that this code will give you a glimpse of how Will Wright designs games, and what was going on in his head at the time!

Forex Trading Game

eToro lets users practice play, or deposit funds for real money trading. The currencies available to trade are the US Dollar, British Pound, Australian Dollar, the Euro and the Japanese Yen. This is where it gets fun… There are 4 games to choose from: Forex Marathon – You pick the currency you think will go up and have it compete in a foot race against the currencies you think will go down.


very banking 2015

SimCity donated to OLPC

The goal is to renovate it and take it in new directions, by applying Seymour Papert’s ideas about education, Alan Kay’s about oo programming, and many exciting ideas about blogging, game mods, and lessons learned from WoW, The Sims, Spore, etc

2007-11-30:

The goals of deeply integrating SimCity with Sugar are to focus on education and accessibility for younger kids, as well as motivating and enabling older kids to learn programming, in the spirit of Seymour Papert’s work with Logo. It should be easy to extend and re-program SimCity in many interesting ways. For example: kids should be able to create new disasters and agents (like the monster, tornado, helicopter and train), and program them like Logo’s turtle graphics or Robot Odyssey’s visual robot programming language!

heh. it appears the OLPC may be the best (last?) chance for alan kay’s ideas to be implemented at scale.