Category: games

Patent Madness: Yahoo Owns the Patent for Initiating a Game from an Instant Messenger

Behold Yahoo’s US patent 6,699,125:

… The game server includes logic to operate a multiplayer game using inputs from and outputs to an active game set of game clients, wherein game clients other than those in the active game set can join an active game by supplying the game server with a reference to the active game. Additionally, logic is included for coupling a game client to a messenger client to allow the game client to send the messenger client data used to initiate joining a game, whereby a message sent by the messenger client includes the data used to initiate joining a game.

Now, apart from the complete blatant obviousness of this idea – use an instant messenging system to initiate a game – I think the amount of prior art for this one is staggering.
Just in my own small part of the world, people were discussing this idea as early as 1997, and browsing through my own emails, I can see I first implemented a program quite similar to the patent in early 1999. They applied for the patent in 2001. I am sure thousands of other people have done the same, much earlier.

So obviously Yahoo is sueing some former employees for infringing this patent.

The good news recently was that the European Union has postponed a decision to implement software patents here, but we are not immune to the effects of the US Patent office. (And I believe the European Patent Office has already awarded software-like patents.)

I should say that I am not particularly anti-patent, but a patent system is never better than its implementation – obviousness and prior art have to matter.

This madness has to stop.

Gaute Godager of Funcom at the ITU, Friday February 4th

We had a visit from the Eve Online people last week, this week is the Anarchy Online talk by Gaute Godager of Funcom:

Friday February 4th 2005, at 16:15.
IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen s, Auditorium 2.

In this talk, Gaute Goadger will document the basic driving forces of a social game, like a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG), from a modern psychological perspective.

This lecture will not delve heavily into a scientific perspective, but rather have a laid-back and hopefully entertaining discussion of our experiences from making online games, specifically Anarchy-Online the critically acclaimed Funcom MMOG title.

The lecture will focus on the interaction between game design, social engineering (community design), programming and having fun!

Will Wright interview at The Onion AV

Really interesting interview with Will Wright at The Onion’s AV Club (no, it’s not a parody.)

I realized at the end of SimAnt that the simulation we built for the ants was almost more intelligent than for the guy, because the guy was being done using traditional programming, whereas the ants were done using this distributed environmental intelligence of the pheromone trails. I began wondering, could we build a more robust simulation of human behavior if we adopted this ant model, where we distribute the intelligence not through the agents, but through the environment?

(Via Robin.)

Inhumane Punishment: No Video Games in Prison

From CNN.
The US state of Missouri has banned all video games in the state’s prisons. Why? Because inmates had been playing violent video games.

In prison, inmates should “pick up skills and abilities that will allow them to go back out into society and be productive citizens,” Blunt said. “Playing video games doesn’t have anything to do with either of those objectives.”

Hmm. I always thought one of the most terrifying aspects of prison was the sheer boredom at such a place. No video games, this is just too inhumane & heartless.

Rwanda Genocide Simulation. Ouch.

Pax Warrior is a new game/simulation where the object is to save as many lives as possible.

Details are scarce and screenshots are few, but it seems you play the role of a UN peacekeeper and have to make decisions about how to do your job.

In a way, it indicates how games about touchy, tragic, and sensitive subjects are catching on. I think it’s good that there are more games about bad things.

BBC writeup here.

Is Nutella Left- or Right-Wing? Is Chess?

Nutella

The International Herald Tribune reports of a current discussion in Italy of whether Nutella (the chocolate spread) is left- or right-wing.

“Only Italians could turn something like this into an ideological question,” said Gigi Padovani, who put the question to a group of students at the Velso Mucci Institute, a technical school for chefs and waiters in this small town in northern Italy.

As the dark creamy treat turns 40, intellectuals throughout the country have been debating what Padovani calls the “cultural, social, artistic and gastronomic phenomenon” that is Nutella.

I often discuss ideology in games with TL, Gonzalo, and my other colleagues. I am always the one saying that ideology is partially a matter of interpretation and that you can’t really determine the ideology of Sim City or the Sims.

The Nutella discussion makes me realize that the problem is that I don’t really think ideologies work. That is, we do have ideologies, but ideologies are simply not able to describe and evaluate the world to the detail that we imagine.
I think that actual ideologies are flawed piles of contradictory beliefs, and that most of the actual world is too complex to be understood (or ruled) by a single ideology.

That is, we may believe ourselves to have a complete, good, and amazingly coherent ideology (left- or right-wing, for example) but in actuality each of us entertains numerous wildy contradictory beliefs a the same time.

Especially when it comes to art (and food), many of the actual determinations (left wing or right wing?) are going to be completely random. There is nothing in Nutella to give it affinity with any particular ideology (left or right).
The Russian composer Shostakovich was denounced as “formalist” (shudder) several times under Stalin. Now, while there certainly was an ideology that all things, art included, had a completely objective and determinable ideology, I think we would be hard pressed to claim any compelling connection between Marxism and being against “formalist” musical compositions.

Returning to games, Hans Petschar has an analysis of the history of chess across different cultures, where the introduction of diagonal movement for the queen and bishops is a “dynamization of space” and reflects European thought. I don’t find this terribly compelling either.

Many games just don’t “really have” an ideology, yet some games do convey messages and beliefs.
When is the ideology we see just a mirror of our expectations, and when is it really there?
How can we tell the difference?

Henry Jenkins Lectures in Copenhagen on Friday the 14th of January

Henry Jenkins speaks at the ITU this Friday: “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling”.
It’s at the IT University, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, Copenhagen S.
16:15-17:30 in auditorium 2.

Jenkins is always a great speaker and cultural thinker, so it should be worth going.