“Play The Game of War,” says the monotone voice, as footage of a silver
board topped with jagged counters fades into view, “and you will learn
how to transform the enclosed lands of spectacular capitalism into the
participatory playgrounds of cybernetic communism.”
[…]
High-ranking members of the UK Labour Party have been playing The Game
of War under direction from Class Wargames’ founding member Richard
Barbrook: seasoned academic, leader of Games for Everyone, writer behind
The Game Of War short film, and a recent addition to the Shadow
Treasury war gaming team.
When I talk to General Sir Mike Jackson, it is in an auditorium of the British Museum, beside a banner promoting Civilization 6.
It strikes me as a surreal situation to find myself talking to the
former chief of general staff and head of the British Army until 2006,
and one of the most high-profile generals in the British Army since
World War II.
General Jackson admits he has not
played the strategy game, so I ask him instead about his experiences of
real warfare. He talks to me about the moral uncertainties of
contemporary global conflicts. “Syria is extraordinarily complex,” he
tells me. “You think you have it worked out today who’s with whom, but
tomorrow it will have changed again.“
Across the video game industry, engineers are working to make eyes more
realistic—or at least less creepy. Despite all of our advancements in
CGI and real-time physics, we’ve hit a wall. Call it the uncanny valley.
Call it something else. But the eyes in games are terrible, and it’s
holding back the believability of every character on the screen. And
unfortunately, thanks to a combination of challenges including physics,
limitations in processor power, and our own nuanced ability to read
eyes, we’re nowhere close to being able to solve it.
When your Inquisitor recruits Blackwall in Dragon Age: Inquisition, you have a short conversation with him after he returns to Haven
with you. He asks you if you’re really the person they pulled from the
rift in the sky, and if you’re not human, he follows that up with, “I
have to admit, I thought you’d be…” That question just hangs in the air,
your character answering, “Human?”
Behind all of this, the key idea behind this network model is that the server is THE REAL GAME. What happens on the server is all that counts and the server never trusts what the client says they’re doing:
The server does not trust where the client says they are (position)
The server does not trust when the client says they fire a bullet or
when the client says they hit another player with that bullet.
The server does not trust the fire rate of the weapon or the ammo count on the client.
The server does not trust what the client says they have in their inventory, and especially not the weapon the client says is in their hands…
What happens instead is that the server takes the inputs from the client and runs those player inputs in THE REAL GAME (on
the server). What happens as a result of those inputs on the server is
what really happens and is seen and experienced by other players in the
game. Not because those actions were sent from the client to the server
and magically validated, but because those actions are what actually
happened on the server in response to the player’s inputs.
a little stunned that a pc game in tyool 2016 would do something different
While I was working for the defunct social network, hi5, a new CEO took over, Alex St. John. He’s written this article for Venture Beat about his feelings on game developers complaining about their poor working conditions. I won’t speak ill of his article here. Instead, this is what everyone else is saying about this article: Steven Hansen for Destructoid: In it, St. John hand waves away…
New features: - Added native 64-bit support for Linux. - Added
support for Vulkan graphics API on 64-bit Windows and Linux platforms.
To use it, you must start The Talos Principle in 64-bit mode (when
prompted by Steam’s popup launcher). Then, in the game’s menu, select
Options / Graphics Options / Graphics API, and choose Vulkan from the
drop-down menu. Of course, make sure you have the latest drivers
installed prior to starting the game.
cool; hopefully vulkan results in more readily optimized and portable graphics engines in games over the next several years
This Thursday the 28th of January at 6PM GMT, troops from our dev and QA barracks will livestream a spoiler-free hour of XCOM 2 on Linux. We’ll provide video commentary as we go, so beware of bickering, joshing, and highly articulate spluttering.
Use #FeralPlays on Twitter to prep us with questions to answer during the livestream, then take aim at our Twitch channel or the video below to watch us dive head-on into a terrifying new cast of enemies.
XCOM 2 is developed by Firaxis Games and will be brought to Mac and Linux by Feral Interactive.
“The most important thing to know about this game is what’s called the frame rule. Starting from power on, every 21 [frames], the game checks to see if you’ve completed the current level so that it can load the next one.”
46:35: “We’re inside this pot, and this pot doesn’t have a destination assigned to it when you drop down it ’cause you’re not supposed to be able to drop down it. It just so happens that Ganon’s room is room 0, so if you don’t have a room assigned to it, you’re going to room 0, and that’s Ganon.”
When I was very young, games were magic. Plugging the brains of a Missile Command cartridge into the body of an Atari 2600 and turning it on seemed to create a soul that I could see onscreen and touch through the controller. In some sense the game seemed alive and not fully knowable to me. There were secrets hidden within. I remember my father excitedly showing me how if you did just the right thing, a thing that defied the logic of the game itself (not scoring points, wasting missiles), initials would appear, the mark of the game’s creator.
Over time, my sense of a living soul in games faded. Games seemed to lay themselves bare, wanting to banish any sense of true mystery, wanting everything they had to offer to be apparent and visible and easily found by the player. Technology became mundane to me rather than magical. The sense of a soul, or of a real world being created, TRON-like, in the circuits of a computer or game console evaporated. When I did encounter “secrets” in a game, I was usually just dismayed by their banality and complete absence of magic or mystery. Often they were secrets in plain sight, marked on maps or indicated in other ways, their meaning spelled out so that players wouldn’t be confused or mystified. But sometimes I want to be mystified. Rather than letting me feel like I was glimpsing something raw and real, “secrets” like this made me feel like I was being kept at arm’s length, like there was nothing but a facade to engage with.
This is what speedrunning does for me. It gives life back to video games. Speedrunning reveals to me just how little I know and understand about the games that I thought I knew and understood so well, games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. There’s an intimacy to it, a breaking past the surface. Speedrunning reveals to me that almost every game is full of secrets; not the kinds of secrets that designers place in games for players to find, but secrets that the designers don’t even know about or intend, secrets that are the game’s own, things borne out of the process of its creation. Through speedrunning, these games continue to live and be explored; there are still mysteries to be discovered. There may be a new Super Mario Bros. world record by the end of February, they said at AGDQ last week.
When I watch a speedrun, I have that same sense of wonder that I did as a child, which comes from the feeling that somewhere in the code of a game resides something that is almost alive, a glowing core that we can observe and try to understand and maybe, in some sense, touch.
kreuzaderny