fps_doug vs. f4tality

xirdalium Posted on by

fps_doug vs. f4tality
I already mused about ↵Wikipedia as emic knowledge—now I have to contribute a tidbit myself: In ↑Pure Pwnage‘s ↑Episode 8 “Lanageddon” I just discovered an ↑easter egg which is not yet listed in the ↑easter-egg section of ↑Wikipedia’s entry Pure Pwnage. During FPS_Doug’s fragging spree at the ↑CS:S tournament we see him defeating a row of opponents. At 12:05min we can see whom he defeated, too: ↑world’s greatest himself! Well, not exactly, as ↑Jonathan Wendel‘s famous nickname is spelled “Fatal1ty”, and on Doug’s screen we read “f4tality”. Not the “i”, but the “a” is replaced according to the ↑common transliterations in ↑leetspeak. That way no intellectual-property war can arise, I guess. But to the audience “in-the-know” it is unmistakingly made clear how much Doug ↑pwnz.

Btw—Tom’s Hardware Guide carries an ↑article on Pure Pwnage.

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payne & redemption

xirdalium Posted on by

Payne & Redemption
 

After ↑Max Payne Hero there now is another Max-Payne fan film in the making, called ↑Payne & Redemption. Fergle Gibson, writer and director of the upcoming movie said to ↑Deep Six:
 

Payne & Redemption is Part III of a series of collective shorts surrounding an original foreboding tale of love, betrayal, vengeance… and a whole lotta painkillers. The story focuses on the development of Max Payne’s character, exploring his psyche and what drives his incessant behaviour towards pursuing what’s most important to him—Justice.

However, I guarantee, for those of you who couldn’t give a flying f*** about all that psycho-babble, there will be plenty of over-the-top murder and mayhem to satisfy all your masochistic needs!



The indie short movie’s executive producer, Luke Morgan Rowe, has ↑announced Payne & Redemption at the 3DR-forums, too—but there’s no more information given yet. At ↑the movie’s official website there is a link to a short teaser trailer [00:42min | .mov | 2.9MB], alas …
 

Like many other teaser trailers, this teaser trailer contains no footage or plot details from the actual film itself, but instead serves as an advertisement to alert everyone to the film’s production.

via entry at deep six

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technology underground

xirdalium Posted on by

The Moller Skycar
 

↑GURSTELLE, WILLIAM. 2006. ↑Adventures from the technology underground: Catapults, pulsejets, rail guns, flamethrowers, Tesla coils, air cannons, and the garage warriors who love them . New York: ↑Clarkson Potter.
 

The technology underground is a thriving, humming, and often literally scintillating subculture of amateur inventors and scientific envelope-pushers who dream up, design, and build machines that whoosh, rumble, fly—and occasionally hurl pumpkins across enormous distances. In the process they astonish us with what is possible when human imagination and ingenuity meet nature’s forces and materials. William Gurstelle spent two years exploring the most fascinating outposts of this world of wonders: meeting and talking to the men and women who care far more for the laws of physics than they do for mundane matters like government regulations and their own personal safety.

via entry at boingboing

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engaging anthropology

xirdalium Posted on by

↑ERIKSEN, THOMAS HYLLAND. 2006. ↑Engaging anthropology: The case for a public presence. Oxford: ↑Berg.
 

Anthropology ought to have changed the world. What went wrong? Engaging Anthropology takes an unflinching look at why the discipline has not gained the popularity and respect it deserves in the twenty-first century. From identity to multicultural society, new technologies to work, globalization to marginalization, anthropology has a vital contribution to make. While showcasing the intellectual power of discipline, Eriksen takes the anthropological community to task for its unwillingness to engage more proactively with the media in a wide range of current debates, from immigrant issues to biotechnology. If anthropology matters as a key tool with which to understand modern society beyond the ivory towers of academia, why are so few anthropologists willing to come forward in times of national or global crisis? Eriksen argues that anthropology needs to rediscover the art of narrative and abandon arid analysis and, more provocatively, anthropologists need to lose their fear of plunging into the vexed issues modern societies present.
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half real

xirdalium Posted on by

half-real
 

↑Jesper Juul, ↑the ludologist, has published his book ↑half-real—here’s the ↑about:
 

A video game is half-real: we play by real rules while imagining a fictional world. We win or lose the game in the real world but we slay a dragon (for example) only in the world of the game. In this thought-provoking study, Jesper Juul examines the constantly evolving tension between rules and fiction in video games. Discussing games from Pong to The Legend of Zelda, from chess to Grand Theft Auto, he shows how video games are both a departure from and a development of traditional non-electronic games. The book combines perspectives from such fields as literary and film theory, computer science, psychology, economic game theory, and game studies, to outline a theory of what video games are, how they work with the player, how they have developed historically, and why they are fun to play.

Locating video games in a history of games that goes back to Ancient Egypt, Juul argues that there is a basic affinity between games and computers. Just as the printing press and the cinema have promoted and enabled new kinds of storytelling, computers work as enablers of games, letting us play old games in new ways and allowing for new kinds of games that would not have been possible before computers. Juul presents a classic game model, which describes the traditional construction of games and points to possible future developments. He examines how rules provide challenges, learning, and enjoyment for players, and how a game cues the player into imagining its fictional world. Juul’s lively style and eclectic deployment of sources will make Half-Real of interest to media, literature, and game scholars as well as to game professionals and gamers.

↑JUUL, JESPER. 2006. ↑Half-Real: Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. Cambridge, MA: ↑MIT Press.
via entry at the ludologist

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chinese gold farms

xirdalium Posted on by

The New York Times’ David Barboza has written an article on chinese gold farms, called ↑Boring Game? Hire a player which is available online via the International Herald Tribune:
 

FUZHOU, China One of China’s newest factories operates here in the basement of an old warehouse. Posters of World of Warcraft and Magic Land hang above a corps of young people with drowsy eyes glued to their computer screens, pounding away at their keyboards in the latest hustle for money.

The people working at this clandestine locale are called “gold farmers.” Every day, in 12-hour shifts, they kill monsters and harvest “gold coins” and other virtual goods that they can sell to other online gamers. […]

“For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, me and my colleagues are killing monsters,” said a 23-year-old gamer who works in the makeshift factory and goes by the online code-name “Wandering.”

“I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good, compared to the other jobs I’ve had,” he said. “And I can play games all day.”

He and his comrades belong to the latest global industry to use cheap Chinese labor – the fast-growing world of online gaming, which generates $3.6 billion a year, according to DFC Intelligence, which tracks the online gaming market. […]

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boom: headshot!

xirdalium Posted on by

FPS Doug (Joel Gardiner)
After having given an impression of a decidedly ↑etic perspective on professional gaming (↵world’s greatests), here are instances of the ↑emic perspective of pro-gamers onto themselves and their culture. The ↑pure pwnage ↑series of auto-ethnographical/biographical movies allows unique insights into the 1337-culture of pro-gaming. In front of the background of the recent ↵progressive developments in game-design, especially the midget portraits of FPS-Doug are uniquely enlightening what really is behind gaming culture. From Episode 3: ↑Meet FPS Doug, from Episode 5: ↑FPS Doug CS:S. Download the ↑complete episodes (links to multiple mirrors there).

initially via e-mail from ↑KerLeone—tnx again
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visualcomplexity

xirdalium Posted on by

visualcomplexity
 

Graphical visualization of data is definitely ↵something I am fond of. For aesthetical reasons, but for pragmatic ones, too—sometimes. Anyway, ↑visualcomplexity is a great resource:
 

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field. ↑[…]

via entry at knowledging across life’s curriculum

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stacker

xirdalium Posted on by

Stacker
↑the Onion ↑carries a story on recent—very recent—development inside the gaming industry \o/

NEW YORK—Electronic-entertainment giant Take-Two Interactive, parent company of Grand Theft Auto series creator Rockstar Games, released Stacker Tuesday, a first-person vertical-crate-arranger guaranteed not to influence young people’s behavior in any way.
    “With Stacker, the player interacts with an environment full of boxes—lightweight, uniformly brown boxes with rounded corners—and uses diligence and repetitive hard work to complete his mission,” said Doug Benzies, Stacker‘s chief developer. “We’re confident that the new ‘reluctantly interactive’ content engine we designed will prevent any excitement or emotional involvement, inappropriate or otherwise, on the part of the player.”
    To avoid any appearance of suggestive or adult situations, the graphics consist entirely of rectangular polygons rendered in shades of brown against a simulated gray cinderblock wall. The game is free-roaming inside the warehouse environment, meaning that no goals are set for stacking a certain number of boxes, nor is there a time limit for the stacking. The health-level bar remains at a constant peak, and the first-person perspective avoids the problem of players identifying too closely with the main character, whose name is never specified and to whom nothing actually happens. […]

Please read the ↑full story …

via entry at the ludologist
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