Category: games

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.

Beautiful little video of a lizard playing Ant Crusher.

Now, the lizard is playing a video game (this is the activity it is performing).

But is it playing a game? As in: does the lizard perceive this activity as  to be different from crushing/eating real ants?

Discuss. (I think the answer is no.)

Phew. Lots of work has lead up to this, but here at the New York University Game Center, we can finally announce that we are launching a 2-year MFA Degree in Game Design starting the Fall of 2012.

http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate

Full announcement below.

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NYU Game Center to Offer  MFA Degree in Game Design

Beginning Fall 2012

New York University has announced that the NYU Game Center, one of the world’s leading academic game programs, will offer a new Masters of Fine Arts degree beginning in Fall 2012.  MFA students will explore games as a creative art form as they design and develop games within a context of rigorous scholarly study in the two-year program at the NYU Game Center.

The curriculum includes game design, game programming, visual design for games, and game criticism. The program is distinctive in looking at games across a wide variety of media, from consoles and PCs to smartphones and social networks. Over the course of two years, students will find their voices as creative practitioners working on individual and group projects, as they study the theoretical and cultural aspects of games, all within the thriving community that is the NYU Game Center. For more detailed information, visit: http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate.

“Games are the defining cultural form of this century and the NYU Game Center MFA is dedicated to exploring their potential,” says Director Frank Lantz, “There are places to study the technical and business aspects of games, but the Game Center MFA has a unique creative focus on games for today’s platforms.”

The NYU Game Center features a roster of world-class faculty, including:

• Director Frank Lantz, well-known game designer and successful entrepreneur, an instructor at NYU for nearly two decades
• Katherine Isbister, acclaimed researcher whose work on players was cited in Forbes, Wired, Scientific American, and NPR’s Science Friday this year
• Jesper Juul, leading game scholar and theorist whose most recent book was selected by New Yorker magazine as one of the 5 essential books on games
• Eric Zimmerman, veteran game designer who recently exhibited work at MoMA and co-authored the most widely-used textbook on game design

The NYU Game Center houses one of the world’s largest collections of videogames, and offers a busy schedule of exhibitions, tournaments, and lectures, including the annual PRACTICE: Game Design in Detail conference.

The Game Center MFA was created by Tisch in close affiliation with NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, and NYU Poly. Together with efforts like the Games for Learning Institute and the NYU Poly Game Innovation Lab, the Game Center MFA makes NYU a global leader in games.

Apply now: http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/academics/graduate. Deadline March 1.