The Ludologist

The pretty amazing-looking Japanese arcade game Arm Spirit is being recalled after three gamers have broken their arms playing it. Here it is:

This comes at an unfortunate time, just a month before I leave for DiGRA and Tokyo Game Show. That’s life for you: Sometimes you just miss the boat, or the arm.

Now, the interesting bit is actually the fact that it is being recalled due to three broken arms, and that I also instinctively believe that this is the right thing to do. It is assumed that games should be mostly harmless, and it is hard to argue otherwise.

Games that actually hurt you just remain associated with dystopian sci-fi (Rollerball), but we wouldn’t want it here? Never?

Exciting news for video game history buffs: Not only has the original Fortran source code for the original Colossal Cave Adventure game been found (here) … Dennis G. Jerz has gone all the way and traveled to the original cave, and analyzed the program. It’s in this paper: Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky.

So here we are, the cave:

YOU ARE IN AN AWKWARD SLOPING EAST/WEST CANYON

*

And the source code:

C ADVENTURES
IMPLICIT INTEGER(A-Z)
REAL RAN
COMMON RTEXT,LLINE
DIMENSION IOBJ(300),ICHAIN(100),IPLACE(100)
1 ,IFIXED(100),COND(300),PROP(100),ABB(300),LLINE(1000,22)
2 ,LTEXT(300),STEXT(300),KEY(300),DEFAULT(300),TRAVEL(1000)
3 ,TK(25),KTAB(1000),ATAB(1000),BTEXT(200),DSEEN(10)
4 ,DLOC(10),ODLOC(10),DTRAV(20),RTEXT(100),JSPKT(100)
5 ,IPLT(100),IFIXT(100)

C READ THE PARAMETERS

IF(SETUP.NE.0) GOTO 1
SETUP=1
KEYS=1
LAMP=2
GRATE=3
ROD=5
BIRD=7
NUGGET=10
SNAKE=11
FOOD=19
WATER=20
AXE=21
DATA(JSPKT(I),I=1,16)/24,29,0,31,0,31,38,38,42,42,43,46,77,71
1 ,73,75/
DATA(IPLT(I),I=1,20)/3,3,8,10,11,14,13,9,15,18,19,17,27,28,29
1 ,30,0,0,3,3/
DATA(IFIXT(I),I=1,20)/0,0,1,0,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0/
DATA(DTRAV(I),I=1,15)/36,28,19,30,62,60,41,27,17,15,19,28,36
1 ,300,300/
DO 1001 I=1,300
STEXT(I)=0
IF(I.LE.200) BTEXT(I)=0
IF(I.LE.100)RTEXT(I)=0

According to Wikipedia, Buddha once made a list of games he would not play:

1. Games on boards with 8 or 10 rows (note that Chess as we know it was not invented at this time, though earlier Chess-like games such as Chaturaji may have existed)
2. The same games played on imaginary boards
3. Marking diagrams on the floor such that the player can only walk on certain places.
4. Using nails to place or remove pieces from a heap with the loser being the one who causes the heap to wobble (such as pick-up sticks).
5. Throwing dice
6. Hitting a short stick with a long stick (there is still some debate about the translation of this line)
7. Drawing a figure on the ground or wall after dipping a finger in lac, red dye, flour or water, and having the other players guess what the picture is going to be (a guessing game similar to Pictionary).
8. Ball games.
9. Playing with toy pipes made of leaves.
10. Ploughing with toy plough.
11. Somersaulting.
12. Playing with toy windmills.
13. Playing with toy measures.
14. Playing with toy carts.
15. Playing with toy bows.
16. Guessing at letters traced with the finger in the air or on a friend’s back.
17. Guessing a friend’s thoughts.
18. Imitating deformities.

The list raises a number of questions: Why wouldn’t he play them? Without going into theology I know nothing about (and without offending anyone), my understanding is that Buddha could not have been a sore loser, so it must have to do with the more formal properties of the games themselves. Neither rules ( board games sized 8 or 10), fiction (toy windmills), nor ilinx escape criticism.

So this I’d like to know: which games would he play, and why?

(From Intelligent Artifice.)

New Scientist reports that Jonathan Schaeffer has proven Checkers to end in a draw if neither player makes a mistake.

The crucial part of Schaeffer’s computer proof involved playing out every possible endgame involving fewer than 10 pieces. The result is an endgame database of 39 trillion positions. By contrast, there are only 19 different opening moves in draughts. Schaeffer’s proof shows that each of these leads to a draw in the endgame database, providing neither player makes a mistake.

Schaeffer was able to get his result by searching only a subset of board positions rather than all of them, since some of them can be considered equivalent. He carried out a mere 10¹⁴ calculations to complete the proof in under two decades. “This pushes the envelope as far as artificial intelligence is concerned,” he says.

To sum it up: If we were only a little smarter, Checkers would be just as boring as Tic Tac Toe.

Thanks to Henrik Bennetsen for the heads up.