Category: games

New York Times has an obituary for Steve Kordek, who developed the standard two-flipper configuration of Pinball machines.

In 1947, two designers at the D. Gottlieb & Company pinball factory in Chicago, Harry Mabs and Wayne Neyens, transformed that rudimentary game into one called Humpty Dumpty, adding six electromechanical flippers, three on each side from the top to the bottom of the field.

It was an instant hit — until, at a trade show in Chicago 1948, Mr. Kordek introduced Triple Action, a game that featured just two flippers, both controlled by buttons at the bottom of the table. Mr. Kordek was a designer for Genco, one of more than two dozen pinball manufacturers in Chicago at the time.

“It really was revolutionary, and pretty much everyone else followed suit,” David Silverman, executive director of the National Pinball Museum in Baltimore, said in an interview. “And it’s stayed the standard for 60 years.”

(Via William Uricchio.)

Mass Effect fans are in uproar over errors in the Mass Effect: Deception novel, mostly of the type where the novel contradicts central information from the games.

From the shared Google document chronicling the mistakes. (And the mistakes are pretty bad.)

1. The Citadel is described as being star shaped – Whilst the Citadel does have five arms arranged around a ring, even when it is fully opened, the arms are not in the same plane as the central ring; rather, they are oriented straight forward:

[Error: Lore]

2. There is a batarian embassy in the Citadel – Batarians closed their embassy after the Citadel Council sided with the human System Alliance during a colonization dispute over the Skyllian Verge, and there is no mention of their embassy being re-established in the previous installments. [Error: Lore]

3. Kai Leng visits Chora’s Den – Chora’s Den was closed after Sovereign’s attack on the Citadel. It never re-opened. [Error: Lore]

4. Citadel surrounded by stars – The Citadel is in the middle of a nebula with only one star – Widow – nearby and clearly visible. A few others are only faintly visible through the gas. [Error: Lore]

5. Kai Leng kills a krogan by slicing into the back of its neck and severing the spine – Krogan biology does not work this way. 1) There is a large hump that makes access to the rear of the neck difficult. 2) Most blades (save for a molecular blade) cannot penetrate the thick hide covering the rear of the neck. 3) Even if the spine was severed, the krogan still would not die, as krogan are uniquely equipped with organ redundancy. Instead of an analogue to the human nervous system, they have a second circulatory system with an electrically conductive fluid. [Error: Lore]

Via Gamespot.

There is some truth to this video.

http://www.dorkly.com/video/30941/dorkly-bits-mario-is-too-mainstream

A team at Microsoft has created a gamification (if you will) extension for Visual Studio 2010: Visual Studio Achievements, which adds points for various Visual Studio actions. Full video about it at this link.

As you can tell, it’s on the ironic side of things, but it comes complete with a leaderboard.

Ars Technica has done us the favor of reviewing Visual Studio as a game, perhaps not the funniest post ever, but still.

The gameplay can be very uneven. Some play sessions are an exercise in frustration. It can be difficult to even create a dungeon in the first place, and the game gives few indications of what you’re doing wrong. When it comes to hunting down the monsters within the dungeon, you’re really on your own. But the experience can also be rich and rewarding. The spell-casting system is enormously flexible and varied, and the resulting constructions can be exquisite.

It’s all very Jesse Schell, but I think it points what to we could call the game-vs-tool problem inherent in the idea of gamification: it’s perfectly fine for a game to set up an arbitrary point system, because that then is what matters in the game.

But when I am programming, I am the one who knows that is or isn’t important in what I am trying to do, and somebody else’s point system is likely to be in conflict with my own personal goals.