"Nomi?"
"Yeah?"
"How much do you love me?"
"....Why?"
"Cause I left my book in the car and I don't want to have to put on clothes to go get it."
"You want to know if I love you enough to go out into the cold and rain and get your book, which you left there, so you don't have to put on pants?"
"Yes."
......
"What have you done for me lately?"
Saturday, November 28, 2009
The Best Video Game Ever!
Had some friends over this evening, and while we were talking I fired up Super Mario World on my Wii's Virtual Console. While I played, one friend asked a question to the effect of, "Do we still play games like this one because it's truly a great game, or is it not actually that great and we just play it for nostalgia? I mean, when your [my] kids [who are 2 and 4] hit that magic video game demographic of 8 or 10 years old, will they look at this and recognize a great game, or will they see a crappy old videogame?"
This lead to an interesting discussion of greatness in videogames, and how if it's even possible, could a game objectively be described as "great" or "the best?" We came up some interesting things:
"The Best" anything is a highly subjective matter; Halo is widely considered to among the best FPSs out there, but one of our impromptu round-table members who is a big fan of the FPS genre cannot stand it, as he hates any FPS played on a console. We decided that "best of" contests would work the best within a given genre. I asked would it possible to come up with a list of criteria for each of the "canonical" video game genres in order to remove as much subjectivity as possible from a "best of" contest, and we decided that it probably would, but it was not a task we were interested in at the moment.
Someone brought up something that they had seen on XPlay, I think, about how one of the hosts was introducing some of the games from his childhood to his kids, and sometimes he could not remember why he liked a particular game so much, but other times he found games that he and his kids both had a lot of fun with. We decided that that was probably the fairest possible method, and the best video games could hope for was a certain level of "timelessness," something that can only be determined until a few more generations of people are exposed to the same game; if it was fun for kids then, and still fun for kids 25 years later, then it's probably a really good game. I suggested that, based on that criteria, SMW is probably more timeless than the original NES Super Mario Brothers and everyone seemed to agree with me.
One thing I've thought of since they all left: Since we probably can't fairly list out the criteria for "the best videogame ever," would it be possible list the criteria of a "great" videogame, either by genre or overall? I mean, not everyone has the same list of "best books of all time" but we could probably agree on certain things that make a book great; the same should be possible for videogames. It might be easier with games to list the things that a "great" game shouldn't have: sluggish controls, slowdown, things like that.
This lead to an interesting discussion of greatness in videogames, and how if it's even possible, could a game objectively be described as "great" or "the best?" We came up some interesting things:
"The Best" anything is a highly subjective matter; Halo is widely considered to among the best FPSs out there, but one of our impromptu round-table members who is a big fan of the FPS genre cannot stand it, as he hates any FPS played on a console. We decided that "best of" contests would work the best within a given genre. I asked would it possible to come up with a list of criteria for each of the "canonical" video game genres in order to remove as much subjectivity as possible from a "best of" contest, and we decided that it probably would, but it was not a task we were interested in at the moment.
Someone brought up something that they had seen on XPlay, I think, about how one of the hosts was introducing some of the games from his childhood to his kids, and sometimes he could not remember why he liked a particular game so much, but other times he found games that he and his kids both had a lot of fun with. We decided that that was probably the fairest possible method, and the best video games could hope for was a certain level of "timelessness," something that can only be determined until a few more generations of people are exposed to the same game; if it was fun for kids then, and still fun for kids 25 years later, then it's probably a really good game. I suggested that, based on that criteria, SMW is probably more timeless than the original NES Super Mario Brothers and everyone seemed to agree with me.
One thing I've thought of since they all left: Since we probably can't fairly list out the criteria for "the best videogame ever," would it be possible list the criteria of a "great" videogame, either by genre or overall? I mean, not everyone has the same list of "best books of all time" but we could probably agree on certain things that make a book great; the same should be possible for videogames. It might be easier with games to list the things that a "great" game shouldn't have: sluggish controls, slowdown, things like that.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Google Books Snafu
The method that Google uses to scan books for their Google Books project is pretty interesting. Basically, they take a photo of each pair of pages as the book lays open on a table. Then they use software to digitally "unbend" the image so that it looks like a flat scan. Anyway, it looks like sometimes the person doing the scanning doesn't move quite quick enough for the camera. Check out page 492 and 493 of Charles Babbage's autobiography.
Looking around I found a few other examples from Tech Crunch and Mysterious Ways
Looking around I found a few other examples from Tech Crunch and Mysterious Ways
Monday, July 27, 2009
Scientists Report Pretty Women Get Laid More Often
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Something Cool From My Buddy
My friend Andrew Goodman just sent me a link to his latest project "Exhumation" - go watch it here.
This piece is particularly well served by reading the abstract/artist's statement, part of which I'll quote here
Check it out and visit his his site AndrewLloydGooman.com for more cool stuff.
This piece is particularly well served by reading the abstract/artist's statement, part of which I'll quote here
Exhumation is an interactive piece exploring the role of the image in the creation and perpetuation of scientific racism in the 19th century. Just as a body may be exhumed in order to further a criminal investigation, the text and images in Exhumation represent a body of evidence that has been willfully buried in the hopes of avoiding the persecution of history.
Check it out and visit his his site AndrewLloydGooman.com for more cool stuff.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
WTF?
I came across the following sentence in this article in the NYT Magazine
In the International Academy of Sex Research, the 35-year-old institution that publishes Archives of Sexual Behavior and that can claim, Bancroft said, most of the field’s leading researchers among its 300 or so members, women make up just over a quarter of the organization.Not be overly critical (every writer turns a sour sentence once in a while) but what the hell happened here?
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