Recently in Entertainment & Sports Category

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.)

So how about that sporting even last weekend? That one team totally out-played the other team! They moved the ball around well and scored a lot of points, while preventing their opponents from scoring quite as many. I can't wait until next year's match!

But anyway, here are two sites that review the various Super Bowl ads. Super Bowl Commercials is mostly user-generated content. Entertainment Weekly attempts to round up the five best and five worst ads. My main disagreement is that I hated the "I'll put my socks in the basket" Dodge Charger commercial. I get the premise, but the ad is too long and the emasculating things the men list out is too PC to really nail it.

Here's an awesome zombie outbreak simulator that lets you unleash a hoard of zombies on Washington DC and watch them spread. You can tweak the number of armed civilians, the speed of the zombies, and various other parameters. Maybe if you pick the right values the zombies and humans will live together in harmony!

Trebuchet hurls pumpkin 1,866 feet.

Now Skagit County’s own team TreBarbaric — with a trebuchet that stands 78 feet tall, travels by semi-truck, and requires man, boom truck and crane eight hours for set-up — is headed not for the valley’s own Pumpkin Pitch but for Snohomish County, where a vast dairy farm will host the new Pumpkin Hurl.

It was TreBarbaric that inspired the new Hurl and a revamp of Burlington’s Pumpkin Pitch, which will be judged on accuracy rather than distance. Last year, the team sent a white pumpkin — chosen for its firmness and roundness — 1,866 feet, just 10 feet shy of the Skagit River Park boundary.

The toss won the competition and set a world record.

If you're an engineer like me, you'll want to see more pictures and video of the TreBarbaric trebuchet.

(HT: RB.)

Apparently there are "zombie experts". I knew I went into the wrong line of work.

So why, exactly, do we love zombies so much?

According to experts -- and, yes, there are zombie experts -- it's because for all their limitations, the brain-rotted, animated corpses are so darned versatile -- helping reflect whatever our greatest fears happen to be at the time. ...

Since ancient times, monster stories have been used to channel other concerns about life and death, said Andrea Wood, a graduate fellow at Georgia Tech who teaches the course "Apocalyptic Nightmares of the Living Dead" and is working on a book about zombies in popular culture.

But the zombie, she said, offers a uniquely blank canvas.

"Since the zombie doesn't have the long literary tradition of the vampire or a number of other monsters, it allows artists a degree of autonomy to conceptualize the zombie any way they see fit," said Wood.

I only hope that artificial intelligences take over before the zombies do... at least then I'll have a way to contribute to society besides my obvious physical prowess.

(HT: RB.)

CCP, the makers of EVE Online (which I've been sucked into recently) are going to be releasing a console-based FPS/RTS companion game called DUST 514 that sits in the same world as EVE. This is the first time anyone has attempted to integrate a desktop MMO with a console game, and I'm extremely excited to see how it develops.

EVE is the first MMO I've played since EverQuest over a decade ago. I have always been intrigued by World of Warcraft, but never jumped in. EVE's market-based economic and industrial components were compelling to me, though, so I'm giving it a shot. So far it is extremely engrossing.

(HT: RC.)

Despite the poor camera angle (intentionally chosen by the local Fox affiliate, no doubt) the pitch was a ball.

(HT: Gateway Pundit.)

This is my kind of fishing.

Lots of people are wondering about the posthumous glorification of Michael Jackson by a host of people who would never let their children spend the night at his house, but the explanation is simple: America is Michael Jackson.

• We live the lavish lifestyle of the rich, but we're horribly in debt.
• Our lives are run by yes-men parasites who build up our egos while sucking us dry.
• We've got no moral bearings and prefer a twisted pop-culture fantasyland over reality.
• We live off the glories of our past but fail to recognize that we can never recapture if until we purge ourselves of the previously mentioned maladies.

We glorify Michael Jackson to comfort ourselves.

Ten Ton Hammer has a great discussion of progression via levels and skills in MMORPGs, including a discussion of whether these two paradigms will ever be replaced with something new.

Michael Jackson is being buried without his brain, which is being held back for further examination into the cause of death. Fine. But is it necessary to end the article with this bit of trivia?

- MICHAEL Jackson starred as the Scarecrow in The Wiz, the 1978 musical version of The Wizard of Oz – playing the character without a brain opposite Diana Ross as Dorothy.

What more needs be said?

This desk navigating robot would be pretty cool, if there were any open space on my desk for it to navigate.

The translated-from-Japanese description is priceless.

The all-around control, you may never experience it! The 6 directions control plus 3 speed levels. Also the Robot can be controlled via Artificial Intelligence (AI) after you press the AUTO button, then the Robot can detect-and-escape from the barriers. What's more, after you press the AUTO button and Direction button, the Robot can detect-and-trace the objects. In the Trace mode, the Robot can be charged and run to the controller automatically! The controller as a Robot Station can be stored a Robot inside.

So Guinness World Records has compiled a list of the most influential video games in history, but wow, they're dead wrong.

First, there are only a few options for the top spot: Pong, Super Mario Brothers, Tetris, Legend of Zelda. So which was it? Super Mario Kart! Come on. How can a derivative game be more "influential" than the game that inspired it? That's stupid.

Tetris ranks in at number two, according to the list, and the original Grand Theft Auto is in the number three spot. Where does Super Mario Bros. turn up? Way down at number 17, beneath Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Legend of Zelda itself isn't even on the list, but several of its sequels are. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is on there, but not the original. Super Metroid but not Metroid. Etc.

The list was made by people who either don't know anything about video games, or don't know what the word "influential" means.

(HT: LM.)

By Dwight Schrute.

I loved the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, but I'm not sure how well they'll translate to the movie format. There are huge time gaps and a ton of important short-duration characters that might be hard for the average movie-goer to track.

I've praised Dwarf Fortress before, but it's a hard game to get into because of the steep learning curve. If you need some help getting started, check out this Dwarf Fortress tutorial video.

(HT: JM.)

I used to play MegaTraveller. I could sit around and generate characters for hours... just imagining the stories.

Don't have time to watch the whole I.O.U.S.A. movie in theaters? Well, here's the short version.

The national debt, explained simply enough for movie-goers to get it.