Tag Archives: games

The Metaverse (what is it?)

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This supposedly influential article from January 2020 (remember that innocent time?) is called The Metaverse: What it is… But at the end, you are still not quite sure what it is. It will involve references to Snow Crash and Ready Player One, obviously. It will be the successor to the current internet. It will be interoperable between platforms and technologies, and it will be always on and always accessible. It will not be a “virtual world”. Okay, I have to admit that is exactly what I thought it would be.

There are a couple things I can imagine coming in the near future. One is much better video conferencing using avatars with facial expressions and eye contact. Those of us who have participated in the last year and a half of mostly remote work have learned that video conferencing has come a long, long way, but this is a key next step to make it more engaging and realistic. I still think augmented reality has to be a big deal (see Rainbow’s End). This will project an additional layer of information/content onto the real world, which I personally am looking forward to although I can imagine it becoming addictive and making the un-augmented real world seem dull and ultimately be neglected (see Rainbow’s End). We just need the right sort of unobtrusive glasses or visor to make it work in the short term.

People will be able to live much farther off the (physical) grid if that is what they want to do, and real-world cities might suffer as a result. On the other hand, real-world cities might become even more interesting than they are now. Cities are information and experience-rich, after all.

simulation games

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This Wired article has a run-down of new(ish) simulation games. Before I entered the intensive child rearing years, I was one of those people like the author that was into this type of game (and also sports games, which are a simulation of sorts), and not so much into arcade-type games. So it is somewhat comforting that there are other people like me.

I keep hearing that the intensive child-rearing years do eventually wind down, and that you remember them fondly as you start to enjoy having some time to enjoy your own grownup life again. For my wife and I, there are just some slight twinkles of light at the end of the tunnel. It’s been a long dark tunnel, particularly with Covid, although of course there have been many joyful moments along the way and over time we will probably remember those and forget the hard parts.

Also appealing to me is the idea of writing my own simulations of real things that I can play something like games. For example, the stock market? climate change? the ecology of my neighborhood? geopolitics? Can I link these things together into one simulation of the universe as it actually plays out, Asimov Foundation-style? Of course not. Many smarter people than me have tried and failed. But the fun could be in the trying. Now, if you will excuse me I need to attend to the (beautiful, healthy, wonderful in every way) whining children and mountains of dirty laundry and dishes and unpaid bills and things in my house that are broken.

QAnon: a game or not a game? and, some thoughts on raising kids, or why a goat is actually not a son of a bitch

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This article about how QAnon is a game but not a game is clearly written by QAnon him or herself. He or she purports to believe QAnon is just a propaganda technique to indoctrinate people into various racist/right wing ideas, not by explicitly stating those ideas, but by leading people to follow a trail of “breadcrumbs” that result in them thinking they arrived at these ideas through their own cleverness. Breadcrumbs that consist of random events people will naturally try to build patterns out of. Then they are connected to other people who have arrived at similar ideas, entering an echo chamber where they can all just sit around sucking each others’…er, reinforcing each others’ beliefs. The fact that it resembles centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and Gargamel from the Smurfs (come on, you know Hillary Clinton would love to drink sweet blue Smurf blood and melt those suckers down to gold in the basement of a pizza parlor if she ever got the chance) is just a coincidence. The coincidence that all those coincidental events appear to be a coincidence is just a coincidence. Next they’ll be telling us that Cuban mobsters with CIA connections didn’t murder JFK, or that Exxon and the Koch brothers didn’t pay people to act as fake “grass roots protestors” to cast doubt on obvious global warming science, or that the insurance industry didn’t pay off our elected officials to make sure Americans don’t have access to a health care system that could deal with a deadly global pandemic (which wasn’t created by the bat people in unholy fornication with the lizard people.)

The author tries to convince you that when most people make the A-OK hand symbol, they actually do not have any satanic intent. For example, astronauts >> aliens >> Satan!!! Do your own research.

The thing with the goat horn symbol is kind of weird though. I used to think it just meant two outs in baseball. I just feel bad for goats.

The horns of a goat mainly perform two purposes. The first purpose, and the one that is perhaps not as well known, is to act as an air conditioning system during hot weather. The horns help regulate body temperature.

The second function of a horn, which is maybe more familiar, is for a goat to protect itself. Goats often communicate by “butting” things. They play by butting or can even show affection. Two of our girls ask for pets by “gently” ramming us in the thigh (it’s bittersweet love). When a goat is threatened, the horn communication becomes more aggressive. They will lower their head and flatten their ears toward their attacker. The thick plate at the base of the skull and the sharp horns act as a great defense system; in some ways it’s like two swords and a shield ready to fight off predators—or a competing buck.

Raising Kids

So contrary to popular opinion, one thing we should be able to agree on is that baby goats are not evil. They are not even sons of bitches. They’re just kids.

climate-friendly investing as a stag hunt

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No, the idea is not that killing and eating stags has a lower carbon footprint than beef (although it might, but if everyone did it would there be enough stags to go around?). The stag hunt is a game studied by game theorists similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. Players can maximize their outcome by cooperating, but there is a risk in assuming other players will also cooperate, and therefore an incentive to make choices that are low-risk for individuals but sub-optimal for everyone.

Green Investment and Coordination Failure: An Investors’ Perspective

To achieve the goal of keeping global warming well below 2 °C, private investors have to shift capital from brown to green infrastructures and technologies and provide additional green investment. In this paper, we present a game-theoretic perspective on the challenge of triggering such investments. The question of climate change mitigation is often related to the prisoner’s dilemma, a game with one Nash equilibrium. However, the authors perceive investment for mitigation and adaptation as a coordination problem of selecting among multiple equilibria. To illustrate this, we model a non-cooperative coordination game, related to the stag hunt, with a brown equilibrium with lower payoffs that can be achieved single-handedly and a green equilibrium with higher payoffs that requires coordination. As multiple experiments show, in such games actors often fail to coordinate on a payoff dominant equilibrium due to uncertainty. Thus, we discuss how uncertainty could be reduced along two options: one that concerns a change in the payoff structure of the game and another that concerns subjective probabilities.

No Man’s Sky

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I was somewhat of a gamer before I had children. That was then, this is now. Maybe when they are safely off to college. I don’t know how fun I would find this game, but the interesting thing is that the universe itself is procedurally generated, which means generated by the computer using a set of rules, rather than designed by the programmers. This means it can be enormous and you can just wander around in it as long as you want.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

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Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is out. I think II was the last version I played. I just moved on to other things, but it is definitely a classic game. Not only is it fun, it makes you think a little bit about geopolitics, food, war, and technology. It’s just realistic enough to make you think, but unrealistic enough to be a lot of fun.

Habitica

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This app turns your to-do list into a game. It’s a cool idea – basically you are setting goals and tracking your progress toward them, not exactly a new idea. But it could be a fun idea that gets you over the hump of a goal that has been eluding you, or the gimmick that gets a team of smart but bored individuals (and smart individuals have a tendency to be bored) to come together and complete an important but less than intellectually stimulating work task.

poker bots

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It never occurred to me before that there might be computers playing in online poker games, but it makes sense.

Bowling says the program isn’t much of a threat to online gamblers. Heads-up, Limit Hold’em is not the variety of poker most people play. But he does believe that “poker bots” are trying to win in online game rooms. “My guess is there are probably quite strong poker bots out there,” he says. “But you’re not going to hear a lot of talk about them.”

Scratch

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“Scratch” is another programming language supposedly aimed at children.

Scratch Overview from ScratchEd on Vimeo.

If you watch the TED talk in the first link, there is an analogy I like – just because you use technology created by others (web browsing, texting, etc.) doesn’t make you fully literate in that technology. It is akin to being able to read but not able to write.