Archiloque

Fragments on the Odyssey of (Il)lusory Dreams
▻https://farawayawayfarer.wordpress.com/2017/09/22/fragments-of-a-dream

https://farawayawayfarer.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/island.png

Is the End of Crocs Really Upon Us? Not So Fast.
▻http://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/what-will-crocs-do-without-patent-protection-for-its-famous-footwear-
▻http://static1.squarespace.com/static/553fdbaee4b0d82b91dbde7d/t/5993ba8fe4fcb5624a643ae3/1502898095448/?format=1000w

Les sites en texte seul font leur retour
►https://www.poynter.org/news/text-only-news-sites-are-slowly-making-comeback-heres-why

A few days before Hurricane Irma hit South Florida, I received a query on Twitter from a graphic designer named Eric Bailey.

“Has anyone researched news sites capability to provide low-bandwidth communication of critical info during crisis situations?” he asked.

The question was timely — two days later, CNN announced that they created a text-only version of their site with no ads or videos.

Reverse Design: Half-Life
▻http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/rd_hl_1.html

Through the Reverse Design series and other documents, we have already set forward the overall history of videogame design several times. Therefore, for this summary I will try to be as brief and as specific to Half-Life as possible about the overall history of games. We will go into great depth about the history of the FPS, however, because of how relevant it is to Half-Life’s design. For a more in-depth look at videogame design history, you can see the initial article about it, or the first few sections of Reverse Design: Super Mario World, which covers the composite era in greater depth. These shorter overviews will make the bigger picture of game design history much clearer. That said, it isn’t necessary to read them; a synopsis of those articles will follow this introduction. For this book, we’re going to focus on the transition from the composite era into the set piece era, and how that was an inevitable consequence of the collision of Western development techniques with Japanese game design styles. Half-Life straddles the composite and set piece eras in a significant way, and so it makes for a great example of the third great inflection point in videogame design history.

The history of videogame design, as we understand the field today, began in 1978 with the game Space Invaders. Obviously, videogames had been invented before this, but Space Invaders was the first game to demonstrate the core principle of videogame design. The designer of Space Invaders, Tomohiro Nishikado, was also the lead engineer responsible for building the physical components of the arcade machine. Because of an error in the way he configured the physical setup of the game, the ranks of enemies (the “space invaders” themselves) moved progressively faster as the player cleared the level of them. This meant that every level would get progressively harder toward the end, and then the difficulty would drop off considerably when the next level started. Although this was accidental, Nishikado kept this feature in the game and then embellished it by making the beginning of each level successively (but only slightly) more difficult. You can visualize the difficulty of the game like so:

Essentially, what Nishikado had done was to treat difficulty as something that could slide up and along an axis. This axis was entirely controlled by enemy behavior, and so we can call it the axis of obstacles—obstacles being the things out of a player’s direct control which stand in the way of victory.

In the early 1980s, other Japanese designers began to experiment with the idea of another axis, one that actually does deal with an element of player control. This was the axis of abilities, which changed the things that players could do. There were two schools of thought as far as the axis of abilities went in the arcade era. The most obvious interpretation of the axis of abilities was in games like Phoenix, Galaga or Pac-Man which moved player abilities up and down on an axis of greater or lesser power. For example, in Galaga, the multi-ship powerup doubled the player’s firepower.

But these powers were always just a secret back door into the axis of obstacles. With Galaga, it’s obvious that the designers were simply increasing the ship’s shooting ability numerically—doubling it. It’s not that different than if the developers were to simply cut the number of enemies by a large fraction. In Pac-Man it’s less obvious but still essentially the same design idea. Over time, the duration of the power pellet’s effect gradually diminishes while the enemies only grow in difficulty. Everything the player needs to know about the power pellet involves the duration of its use, which shrinks to nothing as the game goes on. This quantitative focus in powerups is just a back door into quantitative manipulation of the axis of obstacles.

The other school of thought on the axis of abilities sprang from the work of Shigeru Miyamoto. While most of the games of the early 1980s used powerups as an extra way to manipulate the axis of obstacles, Miyamoto’s first game—Donkey Kong—did something very different. When Jump Man (Mario’s first incarnation) gains the Hammer powerup in Donkey Kong, he loses the ability to jump, but gains the ability to attack enemies. Or, to put it another way, the game temporarily stops being a platformer and starts being an action game.

Instead of treating the axis of player abilities as another quantitative modifier of game difficulty, Donkey Kong sets up a scenario in which the axis of player abilities is one that moves between genres. In Donkey Kong, this was a very rudimentary idea and probably the product of serendipity rather than a clear plan, but Miyamoto and his team must have gotten the sense that moving between genres within a game would be the design style of the future. The great strength of a game that moved between genres (even if only in a small way) is that the game could present new challenges to the player without always getting quantitatively more difficult. The great weakness of arcade games was that, by constantly pushing up the axis of obstacles, they would lose many players who became frustrated by the skyrocketing difficulty before they could really get into the game.

In 1985, Miyamoto and his team created the first real composite game, Super Mario Bros. A composite game is a game in which a player can use the mechanics of one genre to solve the problems of another genre. The prototypical example is Super Mario Bros, in which the player can use platforming mechanics (jumping with momentum) to solve action game problems (defeating or avoiding enemies). The secret of a composite game, though, is not just combining two genres, but rather moving between those two genres without ever abandoning either one. Each level in Super Mario Bros “declines” (literally, leans toward) one of the two composited genres while never ceasing to be a combination of both. In the screenshots below you can probably guess whether the levels in question are in the platformer (lots of jumping) or action (more combat) declensions.

The back-and-forth motion between genres in the composite creates “composite flow.” This is a phenomenon similar to ordinary psychological flow, in that the player becomes immersed in the task and forgets everything else. The unique feature of composite flow is that it is achieved by moving from one genre declension to the other just before the player gets bored or frustrated. All the while, however, the game is continuously getting more difficult. If you were to make a graph of it, it would look something like the figure you see below.

The axis of obstacles is still the foundation of the composite game; it’s just that instead of the axis of abilities being a mere appendage of the axis of obstacles, it truly acts as another axis. Immediately after Super Mario Bros came out, videogame designers all over the world latched onto the idea of the composite game and started making their own combinations.

Composite design thoroughly displaced the arcade style of design, and so we call the period from 1985 until about 1998 the composite period, after which point another game design style became equally popular. During this time dozens of different composites flourished, and the practice of composite design advanced considerably. Designers created some truly great composite games through innovative combinations. Mega Man and Metroid both added shooting to platformers to great effect. Sonic the Hedgehog took the Action/Platformer composite of Super Mario Bros and added racing game mechanics. Castlevania added RPG elements to the Mario formula. ActRaiser created an odd but extremely likeable composite out of the Simulation, RPG and Action/Platformer combination. Even after the heyday of composite games, we still see new composites like Portal, which allows the player to solve platforming problems with shooter mechanics, or Katamari Damacy, which is really a racing game that operates by an accelerated RPG level-up system. Half-Life is partly a composite game, involving both the FPS genre and a considerable amount of platforming. The relationship between Half-Life’s composite parts is, in fact, unusually complicated, because Half-Life is both a composite game and a set piece game, and the kind of composite game that Half-Life draws from has some special properties, too.

One of the most surprising developments of the composite era was the creation of new genres out of old ones. Plenty of games combined two genres in a way that left those two genres apparently intact. For example, everyone can see the way that Mega Man or Metroid alternates between shooter and platform content and sometimes mixes the two. Similarly, the RPG and action elements of The Legend of Zelda are still distinct. In the middle of the composite era, however, composites began to appear where the mix was blurrier. The real-time strategy genre is a good example of this. There are plenty of examples of strategy videogames, but players of the “pure strat” game tend to disdain the RTS as being not really “strategy.” In a certain sense, this is correct because the RTS is quite a bit more than just strategy. Dune 2, the first real RTS, mixed several other genres into the formula. By adding not just action game combat but also Sim-City-style economic simulation, the RTS became its own distinct genre. That new genre didn’t really retain the audiences of any of its composited parts; instead it created a new RTS-specific audience.

The FPS genre is largely the same. Obviously the FPS is a shooter and shooters go all the way back to the 1970s—but consider how little overlap there is between the hardcore enthusiasts of the FPS and the ’shmup, for example. They’re both shooters, but the audience is different, and that difference stems from the genre composite. The first FPS, Wolfenstein 3D, brought together the aiming and dodging elements of the shooter, but it adopted first-person mechanics, exploration and level design of the CRPG.

Culte du cargo, innovation, consulting et baby-foot
▻http://archiloque.net/blog/cargo-cult

http://archiloque.net/blog/cargo-cult/Bonzini_style_table_field_level_view_ready_to_shot.jpg

Bernard Stiegler : lost in disruption ? - 16 septembre 2017 par Alexandre Moatti
▻https://zilsel.hypotheses.org/2878

Bernard Stiegler est depuis quelques années une figure de proue de l’académisme médiatique. Sa voix chaude, traînante et légèrement chuintante est connue des auditeurs de radio – il enchaîne aussi conférences publiques et académiques (300 vidéos sur internet depuis huit ans), en même temps qu’une intense production d’essais (plus de 30 ouvrages depuis 1994).

Le caractère très abondant de cette production nécessiterait une analyse détaillée, portant sur la cohérence et/ou l’évolution de la pensée. Cette analyse ne semble pas avoir été faite puisque le philosophe est reçu (au sens de la réception de ses idées) au fil de l’eau. Côté médias, le rythme intense d’un livre publié tous les 9 mois[1] brouille la ligne de partage entre la promotion d’un ouvrage et l’analyse de fond. On est là dans une forme de « dévoration médiatique »[2] – de l’auteur comme du media lui-même : le rythme de production d’ouvrages s’impose au media, qui ne peut prendre de recul (à supposer que ce soit sa vocation) ; par invitations et tribunes de presse répétées, le media s’auto-dévore, en quelque sorte.

Quant à la réception en milieu universitaire, une question se pose : Stiegler est-il encore un universitaire (ou un chercheur) ? Il semble en fait naviguer depuis quelques années dans cet entre-deux que constitue l’académisme mondain ou « zone médiane », exploitant sa « rente de visibilité »[3] et préoccupé de l’accroître. S’il existe une littérature secondaire à son sujet[4], elle semble plus se rattacher à un phénomène tribal qu’à une réelle analyse critique. Comme souvent, personne ne prend le temps de se pencher de manière critique sur pareille œuvre, et la tâche devient de plus en plus difficile au fur et à mesure que le temps passe.

[...]

“Hold on to the center”: Hyper Light Drifter, the Tao Te Ching, and the process of mastery
▻http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/hold-on-to-the-center

Game Theory Chat : Decolonizing RPGs
▻https://goatsongrpg.wordpress.com/2017/08/13/game-theory-chat-decolonizing-rpgs

RPGs have a violence problem.

In almost every non-indie tabletop RPG, combat receives special attention. It is given additional mechanical and narrative weight. It is brought to the surface and made as a primary tool of in-universe conflict resolution. Character creation is often a race to see who can cause the most harm.

And to further reinforce these notions, the advancement systems in games like Dungeons and Dragons encourage violence as a means to grow more powerful. It becomes the task of the player characters, typically self-made individuals reliant only on themselves and on a small group of ideological comrades, to go out into the parts of the world inhabited by “savages.” There, they murder the individuals that they encounter, destroy their societies, and take their gold and land in order to enrich themselves.

RPGs have a violence problem. What is the solution?

The challenges of supporting geolocation in WordPress
▻https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/733083/6330c6a8976084e8

As much as we get addicted to mobile phones and online services, nobody (outside of cyberpunk fiction) actually lives online. That’s why maps, geolocation services, and geographic information systems (GISes) have come to play a bigger role online. They reflect they way we live, work, travel, socialize, and (in the case of natural or human-made disasters, which come more and more frequently) suffer. Thus there is value in integrating geolocation into existing web sites, but systems like WordPress do not make supporting that easy. The software development firm LuminFire has contributed to the spread of geolocation services by creating a library for WordPress that helps web sites insert geolocation information into web pages. This article describes how LuminFire surmounted the challenges posed by WordPress and shows a few uses for the library.

Publishing with Apache Kafka at The New York Times
▻https://www.confluent.io/blog/publishing-apache-kafka-new-york-times

https://www.confluent.io/wp-content/uploads/implementation-google-cloud-min.png

At The New York Times we have a number of different systems that are used for producing content. We have several Content Management Systems, and we use third-party data and wire stories. Furthermore, given 161 years of journalism and 21 years of publishing content online, we have huge archives of content that still need to be available online, that need to be searchable, and that generally need to be available to different services and applications.

These are all sources of what we call published content. This is content that has been written, edited, and that is considered ready for public consumption.

On the other side we have a wide range of services and applications that need access to this published content — there are search engines, personalization services, feed generators, as well as all the different front-end applications, like the website and the native apps. Whenever an asset is published, it should be made available to all these systems with very low latency — this is news, after all — and without data loss.

This article describes a new approach we developed to solving this problem, based on a log-based architecture powered by Apache KafkaTM. We call it the Publishing Pipeline. The focus of the article will be on back-end systems. Specifically, we will cover how Kafka is used for storing all the articles ever published by The New York Times, and how Kafka and the Streams API is used to feed published content in real-time to the various applications and systems that make it available to our readers. The new architecture is summarized in the diagram below, and we will deep-dive into the architecture in the remainder of this article.

Should You Pull?
▻http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/should-you-pull

http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Spike-Cover.jpg

Most players of mobile games intimately understand the economic model of the Japanese “gachapon” (ガチャポン), even if they are not familiar with the term. Generally speaking, a “gachapon,” (or gashapon ガシャポン, gacha ガチャ, or gachagacha ガチャガチャ) is a coin-operated toy vending machine. Many of us have likely spent our quarters in similar machines as children, accumulating an eclectic array of bouncy balls, stickers, and other cheap goods in the lobbies of supermarkets around the world. The Japanese term derives from onomatopoeia for two distinct sounds: the “gacha,” or the sound of turning the crank of the machine, followed by the “pon,” or the sound of the toy dropping down into the receptacle. It is a blind process, but the graphic advertisement on the front of the machine allures us with the promise of possible rewards. […] This essay briefly explores the intersections between the history of the machines as socio-cultural objects and the use of gachapon mechanics in virtual play.

Consent systems
▻https://www.raphkoster.com/2017/08/27/consent-systems

I was asked on Twitter recently for references for my mention of “consent systems” in my talk on “What AR and VR can Learn from MMOs.” I didn’t have any handy at the time but today I had some free time so I went looking.

Selective authenticity and the Spanish Empire in computer games.
▻http://www.presura.es/2017/08/29/selective-authenticity-and-the-spanish-empire-in-computer-games

http://www.presura.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/conquistadors_by_dakiew.jpg

Furthermore, what the historian-developer’s unwillingness tells us is that digital simulations of the past still draw from historical explanations dating from the 19th century. This is, they focus on the tale of great men and great nations that prove their right to rule by defeating their enemies through the use of violence (Venegas Ramos, A., 2016). However, nowadays the video game medium is mature enough to write the history of Humanity, and the Spanish Conquista in particular, by leaving the myth of the mounted musketeer back in the Iberian Peninsula.

Macedonian ‘Moby-Dick’ Translator Ognen Čemerski, 42, Was a Meticulous Linguist and Engaged Educator
▻https://globalvoices.org/2017/08/30/macedonian-moby-dick-translator-ognen-cemerski-42-was-a-meticulous-lin

https://globalvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Ognen_Cemerski_Jasna-Koteska_photo_by_Vanco_Dzambaski-800x450.jpg

The challenges of translating a maritime novel into a ‘landlocked’ language

Čemerski spent about 12 years working on the translation of “Moby-Dick,” a project initiated during his undergraduate studies at Graceland University in Iowa, USA. He conducted it as a scientific endeavor, and used it as basis of his masters’ thesis in linguistics.

“Moby-Dick or the Whale” by Herman Melville, translated into Macedonian by Ognen Čemerski. Photo by GV, CC-BY.
This was not the first translation of “Moby-Dick” in Macedonian. There was one edition published in the 1980s, translated from Serbo-Croatian, which did not produce a lasting impact.

The main problem of translating a book from 1851 about sailing and whaling was that the Macedonian language lacked maritime terminology. Most of the ethnic Macedonian population had been landlocked during the last centuries, having little contact with the sea in general and sailing in particular. In order to overcome this, Čemerski had to re-construct the vocabulary by first discovering the origins of the English terms, and then trace their equivalents in Macedonian or other Slavic languages.

How the Data Implosion will trigger the Great Game Dev Correction
▻https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20170829/304535/How_the_Data_Implosion_will_trigger_the_Great_Game_Dev_Correction.php

Since at least 2014 I have been alluding to the “coming F2P mobile extinction event” in various comments I have made here on Gamasutra. But the trends were still reversible and I was hoping the indicators were obvious enough that industry would act independently to avoid a death spiral. The problem here is that industry has misinterpreted the indicators and has actually acted to accelerate the actions that would trigger a death spiral.

Techniques to use data science to capture the MSP are of course sensible from the perspective of the developer, but for the consumer this raises the cost of games and thus reduces the perceived value of our products. Here I don’t mean one product. I mean ALL products on the market. The consumer will learn from experience and use inductive reasoning to come to the conclusion that if their last 10 game experiences didn’t really impress them as a good deal, then their next experience won’t either.

Thus by using data science techniques to improve revenue generation in the short term, we end up lowering the MSP for ALL products from ALL sources on ALL platforms over time. This is what I call the Data Implosion. Of course the natural reaction in such a situation where your X Trend continues to decline is to do the “smart thing” and spend more on business intelligence. Which, accelerates the Data Implosion.

Here is why. Game development studios don’t have infinite budgets to spend on games. The more they allocate to BI and data science, the less they allocate to non-quantitative design and creative aspects of the game. I will just call all of these people and assets “Creatives”. As these Creative assets are lowered in value, they experience layoffs and reduced earnings and respect even when they are working. This translates to lowered morale and productivity.

Cache Me If You Can
▻http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=3136953

And so, dear reader, this is where I would like to begin. Unlike most articles in acmqueue, this one isn’t about a new technique or an exposition on a practitioner’s solution. Instead, this article looks at the problems inherent in building a more decentralized Internet. Audacious? Yes, but this has become a renewed focus in recent years, even by the father of the Web himself (see Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project4). Several companies and open-source projects are now focusing on different aspects of the “content-delivery” problem. Our company Edgemesh (▻https://edgemesh.com) is working on peer-enhanced client-side content acceleration, alongside other next-generation content-delivery networks such as Peer5 (▻https://peer5.com) and Streamroot (▻https://streamroot.io), both of which are focused on video delivery. Others, such as the open-source IPFS (InterPlanetary File System; ►https://ipfs.io) project are looking at completely new ways of defining and distributing and defining “the web.”

12 BIG IDEAS from Game Design You Should Know
▻https://medium.com/@cwodtke/9-big-ideas-from-game-design-you-should-know-71d6c5c514ac

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*Bbp6ODy7WXO6M4P1SUrJwg.jpeg

Maps as Media – Fall 2017
▻http://www.wordsinspace.net/mapsmedia/fall2017

Maps reveal, delineate, verify, orient, navigate, anticipate, historicize, conceal, persuade, and, on occasion, even lie. From the earliest maps in cave paintings and on clay tablets, to the predictive climate visualizations and crime maps and mobile cartographic apps of today and tomorrow, maps have offered far more than an objective representation of a stable reality. In this hybrid theory-practice studio we’ll examine the past, present, and future – across myriad geographic and cultural contexts – of our techniques and technologies for mapping space and time. In the process, we’ll address various critical frameworks for analyzing the rhetorics, poetics, politics, and epistemologies of spatial and temporal maps. Throughout the semester we’ll also experiment with a variety of critical mapping tools and methods, from techniques of critical cartography to sensory mapping to time-lining, using both analog and digital approaches. Course requirements include: individual map critiques; lab exercises; and individual research-based, critical-creative “atlases” composed of at least five maps in a variety of formats.

Dynamic Pricing, Personalized Offers, and Modern Gaming
▻http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/WilliamGrosso/20170822/304130/Dynamic_Pricing_Personalized_Offers_and_Modern_Gaming.php

http://www.scientificrevenue.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dynprice_gama_image004.png

Many large games, including at least 5 of the top 10 mobile games, already utilize sophisticated marketing platforms involving machine learning and personalization in order to customize offers for and prices for their players. While it’s hard to say exactly what a given game does or doesn’t do, it’s clear that many of the top games offer different bundles to different players, at different prices.

Towards deploying decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
▻https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/25/towards-deploying-decommissioned-mobile-devices-as-cheap-energy-effici

https://adriancolyer.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/decommissioned-mobiles-fig-5.jpeg?w=520

A Sci-Fi Magazine Created Entirely By Writers And Editors With Disabilities Is Coming
▻http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/destroy-science-fiction-disability_us_59949b80e4b0d0d2cc83cec3

https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/59949ff62700003100d4f5ba.jpeg?ops=1910_1000

Gamasutra - Prioritizing accessibility made Way of the Passive Fist much better
▻https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/304181/Prioritizing_accessibility_made_Way_of_the_Passive_Fist_much_better.php

http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/news/2017/Aug/304181/WOTPF200.jpg

In setting out with this mindset, Canam was in no way compromising his vision. Rather, he was broadening it and taking it in new directions, both to help more people be able to play it, and also to grow in new play directions, as a developer. In doing so, Way of the Passive Fist is paving new ground in brawlers, and giving players some new experiences that will invigorate the genre and give future developers new things to consider.

#Feminism – Storytelling
▻http://storytelling.pelgranepress.com/feminism-a-nano-game-anthology

Looking at the world through a feminist lens reveals absurd, tragic, and fascinating situations.
Written by feminists from eleven different countries, #Feminism offers bite-sized takes on contemporary feminist issues. Each of the 34 nano-games in this collection requires between three and five participants, simple (if any) props, and up to an hour of play time.

MagicaVoxel : A free lightweight 8-bit voxel editor and interactive path tracing renderer
▻https://ephtracy.github.io

https://ephtracy.github.io/image/mv_home.png https://ephtracy.github.io/image/snap2016-06-11-22-31-48.png

Pain-Driven Development: Why Greedy Algorithms Are Bad for Engineering Orgs
▻http://bravenewgeek.com/pain-driven-development-why-greedy-algorithms-are-bad-for-engineering-

I recently wrote about the importance of understanding decision impact and why it’s important for building an empathetic engineering culture. I presented the distinction between pain displacement and pain deferral, and this was something I wanted to expand on a bit.

When you distill it down, I think what’s at the heart of a lot of engineering orgs is this idea of “pain-driven development.” When a company grows to a certain size, it develops limbs, and each of these limbs has its own pain receptors. This is when empathy becomes important because it becomes harder and less natural. These limbs of course are teams or, more generally speaking, silos. Teams have a natural tendency to operate in a way that minimizes the amount of pain they feel.

It’s time for some game theory: pain is a zero-sum game. By always following the path of least resistance, we end up displacing pain instead of feeling it. This is literally just instinct. In other words, by making locally optimal choices, we run the risk of losing out on a globally optimal solution. Sometimes this is an explicit business decision, but many times it’s not.