Category: games

Chess is a Wonderful Tool

The [Wall Street] Opinion Journal interviews Susan Polgar – one of the two famous chess-playing Polgar sisters.

She airs the idea that Chess is a tool for personal improvement:

Chess is a wonderful tool to increase concentration, self-control, patience, imagination, creativity, logical thinking and many more important and useful life skills

It’s an idea that pops up now and then, that a game can improve you as a person. I would love to see somebody write a history of this, I would guess it can be traced, at the very least, to ancient Greece.

At the same time, whenever you spend years focusing on something specific, I think you always end up feeling that what you learned could be used in other contexts. Video game theory for me, certainly, but it’s just like literary theorists or film scholars for whom their medium of choice is a privileged space for all kinds of existential and philosophical thinking.

Cows Enjoy a Mental Challenge

Interesting and silly, from a Times article on cows.

Turns out that cows enjoy problem solving:

Donald Broom, professor of animal welfare at Cambridge University, who is presenting other research at the conference, will describe how cows can also become excited by solving intellectual challenges.

In one study, researchers challenged the animals with a task where they had to find how to open a door to get some food. An electroencephalograph was used to measure their brainwaves.

?Their brainwaves showed their excitement; their heartbeat went up and some even jumped into the air. We called it their Eureka moment,? said Broom.

Just like the rest of us it seems. Other interesting bits about cow psychology in the article, some of which are beyond the scope of this blog.

The L-word

On CBC news (Canada), Greg Hughes has a viewpoint on The future of video gaming.

“Ludology argues that video games are to be understood only in the context of the interface and rules, nothing more or less. Narrativists argue that video games create what’s called “cyberdrama,” in that thay represent a kind of storytelling that immerses the “participant” in characters and story.

If we believe in ludology, the internet-video game model could just be another distraction, a way to continually stimulate already overstimulated minds. Yet it is undeniable that people find meaning in games like Halo 2 and San Andreas, for while they may be electronic and therefore not as “real” as real people, the stories we tell in video games are becoming more real than movie experiences. Why?

Because this time it isn’t Mario or Donkey Kong firing that barrel on screen at faceless villains ? it’s us shooting other people on screen. We’re directly engaged in the experience, a moving character in a sea of digital code. Only this time, it’s not your buddy from down the street ? it’s someone on the other side of the world.”

First of all, interesting to see how the L vs. N thing gets thrown around casually now.
As Derrida said, words just tend to have a life of their own. To the extent that there is an L vs. N conflict, I would say that it’s ludology that’s about “shooting other people on screen” (it’s the real thing), but cyberdrama that downplays such pleasures in favor of precrafted fictions.
I am considering outsourcing this part of the blog to an AI.

Bernie DeKoven’s FunLog

Turns out that Bernie DeKoven, author of The well-Played Game (mostly about physical group games) has his own blog, “Bernie DeKoven’s FunLog“.

Today’s post is “Why do people want to spend their time “killing” each other as a pastime?”

“Major Fun responds:

– we play war because we need to play with it – there’s no other way to integrate such an awful reality into our understanding of the world. it is too ugly, too irrational, too stupid for us to grasp in any other way.

– we know we’re not really hurting anyone or anything, we know that we can’t really die, and without that knowledge, we couldn’t have fun

– we can trust each other if we all know that we’re trying to kill each other, that the very worst in us is not hidden or subsumed by any other attempts at being human, so when we meet, we can meet above all that

– it is remarkably clear, war imagery. we don’t have to worry about double-meanings, about the “real” agenda. nothing else is as vivid. no interpretation required

– play fighting is fun, as long as it is play. it’s a very basic form of play, in all playing animals. it’s safer and clearer than sex play, but in many ways, even more intimate”

Nice to see one of the classic non-electronic games people blogging.

A parent’s primer to computer slang

Microsoft has published a hilariously serious introduction to “computer slang”.

While it’s important to respect your children’s privacy, understanding what your teenager’s online slang means and how to decipher it is important as you help guide their online experience. While it has many nicknames, information-age slang is commonly referred to as leetspeek, or leet for short. Leet (a vernacular form of “elite”) is a specific type of computer slang where a user replaces regular letters with other keyboard characters to form words phonetically?creating the digital equivalent of pig Latin with a twist of hieroglyphics.

Another page discusses “10 tips for dealing with griefers“:

Known as griefers, snerts, cheese players, twinks, or just plain cyberbullies, chances are that a kid near you has been bothered by one of these ne’er-do-wells at least once while playing online multiplayer video games such as Halo 2, EverQuest, The Sims Online, SOCOM, and Star Wars Galaxies. Griefers are the Internet equivalent of playground bullies, who find fun in embarrassing and pushing around others.

Not sure what to think about this – it’s all completely earnest and actually useful for the uninitiated, but just with a 1950’s innocence and Microsoft blue colors in the menus. What has the world come to?