Games
« Older Entries |Games for the handicaped
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010The afternoon presentations at the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium today were all about games and the city. Lots of interesting stuff, but there was one thing that annoyed me. There is a presumption in most of these products that the users are going to be young, healthy, urban hipsters. As an old cripple, I […]
Now this is what I signed up for!
Thursday, December 17th, 2009My favourite computer game type is the Role-Playing Game (RPG). I enjoy it because a well-made RPG is like reading a book, with a lovable heroine (me!) and a strong story-line. Well, it should be, anyways. Alas, the number of well-made RPGs that I have played is, well, miniscule.
In most RPGs, you are either a […]
Raiding alone in Azeroth
Sunday, December 13th, 2009With the latest patch (3.3) to World of Warcraft, Blizzard has introduced another attempt at making playing WoW easier for the casual player: a new cross-server system that lets you join a random dungeon. The cross-server aspect means that you may be playing with people who are not on the same server as you, and […]
Collaborating in MMOs
Monday, December 7th, 2009Yesterday evening, our guild managed to down the last boss, Anub’arak, in 10-person Trial of the Crusader, one of the most difficult raid dungeons that are presently available in World of Warcraft. To me, the most satisfying aspect of this evening was that not only this was the first time that our guild actually faced […]
Retiring the cat herder
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009After about two years of organizing raids for my horde guild in WoW, I have decided that it’s time to let someone else do the job.
There are several reasons for this. For one, I expect to be very busy with co-chairing Graphics Interface all winter and I should concentrate on that. But there are other, […]
MMOs can be good for your psychological well-being
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009Here’s a nice change from the “people are addicted to videogames” rant that you usually find in the papers. There’s a report in the Brisbane Times about a study by Queensland University of Technology doctoral candidate Huon Longman that shows that playing in a guild can have beneficial effects on people’s psychological well-being.
Basically what he’s […]
Advanced facial recognition being ported to PS3
Friday, September 11th, 2009Gizmodo reports on Sony Labs’ facial recognition technology that can track people’s faces and replace it with an animated avatar face. The video on YouTube is a must-see. Of particular interest is how well it handles a face that is slightly turned away from the camera.
From the article, it looks like the technology has been […]
