Recently in Entertainment & Sports Category
In the early 20th century Albert Kahn financed an amazing collection of color photographs.
(HT: Kotaku and Ars Technica.)
I just ordered Vernor Vinge's new novel, "The Children of the Sky"
Here's how to always win LoL Dominion. I hate having to explain all this to my team before a match.
(HT: NC.)
I'm training for the Rock 'n' Roll half-marathon and everything is going pretty well. I've been doing my weekly long runs, and 10 miles was a snap. Last week, though, my 11-mile run was hellish. Blah! What did I learn?
1. If I'm going to do a long run in the evening I shouldn't stand on my feet all day. At work I use a standing desk, but I should sit down as much as possible to prepare for my run, otherwise my feet really hurt.
2. Rest the day before. When I did 10 miles I hadn't run the day before, but when I did 11 miles I had run five miles on each of the previous two days.
I'm going a shorter long run tomorrow -- probably nine miles -- so I'm going to work from home to make sure my body is fresh.
New video about League of Legends: Dominion. Looks awesome.
Monopoly is much more fun if you play by the actual rules in the rule book and auction off properties that players land on but don't buy.
Have you ever played Monopoly?Of course you have. Everyone's played it at some time in their life. It's shared culture, a common element that weaves together our modern world.
But when was the last time you played it?
You can't remember, can you? We've all played it sometime, when we were kids; but never recently, and why?
Because it's crap. It takes ages to play, suffering long action-free periods in which the players endlessly circle the board in search of the streets they need to complete a set, and lacks the interaction between players that we look for in a game. In short, it's boring and lacks skill.
Except that it isn't crap. Actually. You just have to play it the way it was designed to be played.
Monopoly is an auction strategy game, and when you take the auctions out the game is very boring.
Poker is more skill than chance say economists Steven D. Levitt and Thomas J. Miles.
The pair found that the 720 players rated as highly skilled won an average of more than $1,200 each per event, or received a 30 percent return on their initial investment. All other players averaged a loss of $400 per event, 15 percent of their investment.The differences are “far larger in magnitude than those observed in financial markets, where fees charged by the money managers viewed as being most talented can run as high as 3 percent of assets under management and 30 percent of annual returns.”
Statistically convincing to me is the fact that four people have won the main event of the World Series of Poker multiple times.
Four players have won the main event multiple times: Johnny Moss (1971 and 1974), Doyle Brunson (1976 and 1977), Stu Ungar (1980, 1981 and 1997) and Johnny Chan (1987 and 1988).
If poker were largely based on luck rather than skill, the odds of several people winning the WSOP multiple times each would be astronomically small. This data alone is enough to convince me.
(HT: Paul Hsieh.)
xkcd has an awesome set of character interaction diagrams for Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Jurassic Park. I love diagrams.
Via my brother, here's a list of science fiction movies to watch for in 2011. The two most promising to me are the two Spielberg efforts: "Super 8" and "Cowboys & Aliens".
Anyone who has watched Cops could predict Paris Hilton's defense of her cocaine possession:
The officer waited for the arrival of a female officer to assist in the search and they removed the “suspected bindle of cocaine,” and then Paris was read her Miranda rights. Paris told the officer that the purse was not hers, and that “she had borrowed it from a friend.”
That Ain't Mine!
Too bad we weren't watching a Tazed-And-Confused special edition instead.
A very cool set of fantasy artwork created using 8-bit color and HTML 5. Makes me nostalgic for the games I played as a kid... and it makes me wish I had any artistic ability whatsoever.
(HT: RC.)
The prompt is here: How can EVE Online attract more female players?
What could CCP Games do to attract and maintain a higher percentage of women to the game. Will Incarna do the trick? Can anything else be done in the mean time? Can we the players do our part to share the game we love with our counterparts, with our sisters or daughters, with the Ladies in our lives? What could be added to the game to make it more attractive to them? Should anything be changed? Is the game at fault, or its player base to blame?
The answer is extremely simple, and it's really the same way that EVE could attract more male players: add more casual content to the game.
EVE is great as a "hardcore" game, but one side effect of that is that it is impossible to do anything "casually" in EVE except perhaps high-sec mining (which I've never done, and which sounds extremely boring). Every isk is earned by blood, sweat, and tears, and you're not going to risk them to just mess around in the current hardcore mechanics. And the only interesting mechanics are hardcore.
What CCP needs to do is to add some content that is more casual. This content needs to be stuff that you can log into and off of instantly without risk of loss. It should have some effect on the larger hardcore EVE world, but that effect doesn't really need to be so large that is unbalances any of the existing gameplay. For inspiration, consider the game mechanics of some popular games that the girls in my life enjoy:
This casual content should be protected from destruction or theft in high-sec, but riskier and more rewarding in low- and null-sec, just like mining. It should involve building, crafting, socializing, and aesthetics. The results of these activities should be public or publishable so that players can visually share their creations with each other and thereby compete.
Finally: the output from these activities should be marketable. Why? So that every "EVE widow" can start to play and make a contribution to her husband's addiction. I don't think my wife would enjoy PVP or "spreadsheets online", but she would like it if she could play casually and make a contribution to my wave of destruction.
Here are some other bloggers who I think are on the right track:
Related videos here.
(HT: More video game fun from RC.)
Can you identify these video game characters? Even if you can, your video game IQ is only about 5.
(HT: RC.)
Peter Singer writes about the tremendous success the US Army has had with its recruiting/training/entertainment game America's Army:
After two years of development, the game, called America's Army, was released at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a sort of annual pilgrimage for video-gamers that draws some 60,000 people to the Los Angeles Convention Center. What happened next surprised all: The Army didn't just have a new recruiting tool, but an actual market hit. It quickly became one of the top 10 most popular games on the Internet, and within its first five years, some 9 million individuals had signed up to join America's video-game army, spending some 160 million hours on the site and making it one of the top 10 of all video games, online or otherwise.From the Army's perspective, commercial triumph was secondary. Its goal was to recruit. And at this, too, the game proved to be a wild success. To log on to the game, you have to connect via the Army's recruitment website and fork over your information. Gamers can also check out profiles of current Army soldiers and video testimonials of why they joined. Just one year after America's Army was released, one-fifth of West Point's freshman class said they had played the game. By 2008, a study by two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that "30 percent of all Americans age 16 to 24 had a more positive impression of the Army because of the game and, even more amazingly, the game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined." Notably, this is from a game that the Pentagon has spent an average of $3.28 million a year developing and promoting over the last 10 years -- compared with the military's roughly $8 billion annual recruiting budget.
Playing a game is different than actual combat, but the level of competence that can be achieved virtually is amazing.
America's Army quickly expanded from a potent recruiting tool into a valuable training system for soldiers already in the military. Military contractor Foster-Miller's Talon robot, for example, is used widely in Iraq and Afghanistan to dismantle roadside bombs, the most deadly weapon used against U.S. troops there. The game's Talon training module cost just $60,000 to develop, but took training in how to operate robots in war to a whole new level. "Prior to this, the only way to train was to take the robot and the controller to the trainees, give them some verbal instruction, and get them started," Bill Davis, head of the America's Army future applications program, told National Defense. "This allows them to train without breaking anything."But with these advances, it's getting harder to figure out where the games end and the war begins. In Talon the game and the real-life version, soldiers are watching the action through a screen and even holding the very same physical controllers in their hands. And these controllers are modeled after the video-game controllers that the kids grew up with. This makes the transition from training to actual use nearly seamless. As one Foster-Miller executive explained to me, describing the game's training package for the Talon's pissed-off big brother, the machine gun-armed Swords robot, "With a flip of the switch, he has a real robot and a real weapon." Because of "the realism," he said, the company is finding that "the soldiers train on them endlessly in their free time."
I've read in other places that these sorts of games can also teach players important tactical lessons, such as how to properly clear a building, advance under cover, provide covering fire, perform flanking maneuvers, and so forth.
(HT: RB.)
