A few links of interest
- CNet has an article on THQ using brain sensors to refine gameplay. I saw this sensor at GDC last year… The game industry doesn’t do nearly enough, overall, in terms of scientific assessment of their product. There’s a great playability lab at Microsoft that monitors players as they experience games, but there’s a really long way to go in terms of measuring people’s reactions to the content. Fortunately, there’s folks like Mark Terrano (who has a great diagrammatic method of measuring player engagement over gameplay time), Nicole Lazzaro, and Dan Cook thinking about this. 🙂
- Seth Schiesel has a piece in the New York Times today about how game censorship laws keep getting struck down by courts. It points out that most of the decisions have continued to follow Judge Posner’s lead:
“Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low,” he wrote. “It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.”
- Reuters is reporting that Lancet has a piece on the World of Warcraft epidemic that happened a couple of years ago, the “corrupted blood” thing. One of the chief discoveries? Rubberneckers would stop by to gawk, get infected unknowingly, and then leave, spreading the infection. Apparently this is something that wasn’t considered as a major risk factor in current models of the spread of infectious diseases (really?!?).
“Someone thinks, ‘I’ll just get close and get a quick look and it won’t affect me,'” she said.
“Now that it has been pointed out to us, it is clear that it is going to be happening. There have been a lot of studies that looked at compliance with public health measures. But they have always been along the lines of what would happen if we put people into a quarantine zone — will they stay?” Fefferman added.
“No one have ever looked at what would happen when people who are not in a quarantine zone get in and then leave.”
She will now incorporate such behavior into her scenarios, and Fefferman is working with Blizzard to model disease outbreaks in other popular games.
Good for Blizzard. 🙂
3 Responses to “A few links of interest”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I remember that corrupted blood thing, that was hillarious.
All these low-level guys in Ironforge, dying within moments of being resurrected. High-level guys wandering around, taking damage but not dying. All the NPCs infected. Corpses everywhere.
The great thing about the new EEG stuff is that you don’t have to wait for the commercial versions. There’s already an open source eeg kit available.
http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/
The art group Shifz used it to build a bot that mixes martinis based on thinking.
http://blip.tv/file/240203
Judge Posner’s comments on violence in games are extremely interesting, he of the belief in selling babies on the free market and legalizing drugs.
I agree with his comments as far as they go. What they don’t get into is extreme examples of violence. And this is Judge Richard Posner’s brilliance, to hit the mark so hard that it’s hard to argue with him, yet to leave it incomplete because he doesn’t believe that morals of any kind enter the equation at all.