Archive of posts with tag 'games'

Weekend Reading: Post-Truth, Knowledge, and Game Graphics

May 30, 2020 • #

⚖️ The Way Out of Post-truth

Another razor sharp analysis from Gurri:

The collapse of trust in our leading institutions has exiled the 21st century to the Siberia of post-truth. I want to be clear about what this means. Reality has not changed. It’s still unyielding. Facts today are partial and contradictory—but that’s always been the case. Post-truth, as I define it, signifies a moment of sharply divergent perspectives on every subject or event, without a trusted authority in the room to settle the matter. A telling symptom is that we no...

Stadia

April 13, 2020 • #

I enabled a trial of Google’s Stadia gaming service yesterday to kick the tires. In Google fashion, their entry into the gaming market isn’t centered around consoles and hardware, but cloud-distributed streaming.

During the unveiling at GDC last year, it seemed impossible to believe that you could deliver a latency-free, 4K experience in high-end games.

15 years ago I was gaming a lot more, but in the last several I’ve done almost none outside of the random iPhone game. I still loosely follow the gaming industry, and often wish I could easily jump in and mess around in...

Weekend Reading: Universe Sandbox, Mapping Math, and Japanese Companies

February 15, 2020 • #

🌌 Universe Sandbox

This is a physics simulator that replicates the physics of interstellar objects. You can simulate massive planetary collisions or supernovae in the Earth’s solar system, in case you want to see what would happen.

🧮 The Map of Mathematics

A neat catalog “map” of mathematics, with visualizations of things like prime numbers, symmetry, calculus, and more. Quanta Magazine does fantastic work.

🇯🇵 Why So Many of the World’s Oldest Companies are in Japan

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Weekend Reading: Soleimani, Prosperous Universe, and Roam

January 11, 2020 • #

🇮🇷 The Shadow Commander

This 2013 piece from Dexter Filkins gives an excellent background on Qasem Soleimani, an important figure now well known after his killing a couple of weeks ago, but prior to that hardly known by anyone other than experts, even with his massive influence in the region.

🌌 Prosperous Universe

I’m always intrigued by complicated simulation games. I remember a few of these “real-time” MMO games being popular in the early days of online gaming. Glad to see the genre still kicking in an era of low-attention-span gaming...

Weekend Reading: Bullets in Games, Lessons of History, and BrickLink

January 5, 2020 • #

🎮 How Do Bullets Work in Video Games?

A cool analysis of methods for rendering bullet physics in games.

🏟 Notes on “The Lessons of History”

Maksim Stepanenko’s notes on Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History. I’ve got this one on the shelf, and these nuggets make me want to pick it up now to read.

While working on some Lego sets with the kids, I wanted to know if some...

Reflections of a Video Game Maker

March 6, 2013 • #

If you enjoy hearing stories from visionaries, listen to this talk that Gabe Newell (founder of Valve) gave at UT Austin:

In it he discusses economies within Steam, where Steam is headed as a central core of APIs for game publishing, and a good bit about how the company operates.

“It seems fairly obvious that the Internet does a better job of organizing a bunch of individuals than General Motors or Sears does. Corporations [with hierarchies] tend to be pre-internet ways of...

Double Fine: Making Games

February 26, 2012 • #

Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer have a conversation about adventure games.

This was just before Double Fine raised $2.2MM on Kickstarter to fund a new adventure game.