Gamer's Radical Realization: I Prefer Playing With Myself (65)
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Wired Top Stories (4271)
2 weeks, 5 days
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A fearsome warrior engages in battle in the classic, medieval-quest RPG world of Fable II. Screenshot Courtesy Microsoft Game Studios "Why do you want to play alone?" A friend of mine recently asked me this, during an argument about Fable II. I'd recently begun playing the game — a classic, medieval-quest RPG world — and had devoted hours to leveling my character into a fearsome, beloved warrior. I'd amassed Ninja Gaiden-esque skillz, learned flesh-singeing lightning ...
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kkt said:
Reminder that we need to provide the *option* of being alone, because people are unreliable sometimes, and there are times when it's better to be alone, whether to focus or to take a break.
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Jordan T-H said:
Oh how cute, a writer discovers what gamers have been experiencing (and discussing) since the dawn of MMOs.
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iAdramelk said:
A friend of mine recently asked me this, during an argument about Fable II. I'd recently begun playing the game — a classic, medieval-quest RPG world — and had devoted hours to leveling my character into a fearsome, beloved warrior. I'd amassed Ninja Gaiden-esque skillz, learned flesh-singeing lightning spells and won sacks full of bling. I'd explored the far ranges of the amazingly detailed land, and the townsmen were bowing and scraping for my favor. I had four different girlfriends.But to my friend, this made no sense. He's a hard-core online gamer — a member of a long-running World of Warcraft guild — so single-player RPG worlds seem completely baffling to him. Not to mention antisocial.
Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook 'Friends' (2)
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Wired: Tech Biz (30)
3 weeks, 3 days
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Benjamin Waber has a grim piece of news for managers and CEOs: You're out of the loop. Waber, a PhD student in MIT's Human Dynamics Group, studies the way groups interact socially — based on who's talking to whom. But unlike most social scientists, who simply ask people about their behavior, Waber and his colleagues measure it. They outfit employees with special badges that work with base stations to log all conversations between employees, including ...
Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work? (28)
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3 weeks, 5 days
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Check this out," Massimo Banzi says. The burly, bearded engineer wanders over to inspect a chipmaking robot—a "pick and place" machine the size of a pizza oven. It hums with activity, grabbing teensy electronic parts and stabbing them into position on a circuit board like a hyperactive chicken pecking for seeds. We're standing in a one-room fabrication factory used by Arduino, the Italian firm that makes this circuit board, a hot commodity among DIY gadget-builders. ...
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Robin said:
Scroll halfway down for pics of cool Arduino gadgets.
New technique renders objects at sea "invisible" to waves of water (4)
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collision detection (18)
3 weeks, 5 days
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This is incredibly cool: A group of engineers and mathematicians have built a device that renders an object invisible to waves of water. Last month, I blogged about the ever-more-surreal research into "invisibility cloaks" (including some Chinese guys who invented anti-invisibility technology). As you may recall, the invisibility cloaks all work by hacking the wave nature of light. The cloak consists of a round barrier around an object that takes incoming waves of light -- ...
At Amherst college, 1% of first-year students have landlines, 99% have Facebook accounts (2)
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1 month, 4 weeks
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Peter Schilling -- the director of information technology at Amherst College -- crunched the numbers on the technological habits of this year's incoming class, and discovered some fascinating stuff. He's published it online as the "IT Index", crafted in the style of a Harper's Index, and it's an intriguing snapshot of some of the technologically-driven behavioral changes that will mark the next generation. Below are a few of my favorite stats, culled from the list. ...
The environmental cost of Esquire's e-ink cover (1)
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Clive Thompson (201)
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1 month, 4 weeks
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This month, Esquire celebrated its 75th anniversary by publishing the world's first magazine cover with e-ink -- a trippy little display that blinks and pulses (video above). It's super cool-looking, and hackers have been trying to figure out how to tinker with it. To show off the technical challenges of producing the cover, Esquire put together a set of maps showing the globe-trotting path the various components traveled before they were assembled. This led a ...
Binary marble adding machine (2)
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2 months
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I only discovered this now, fully a year after everyone else blogged about it, but it's so awesome I have to write about it: A mechanical, binary adding machine that uses marbles to flip the bits. There are several gorgeous close-up pictures of the device on the web site of the designer, Matthias Wandal, but the best way to understand it is to watch that video of it in action! I'm a huge, huge fan ...
Cows align themselves with magnetic north (3)
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2 months, 1 week
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I'm coming a bit late to this one, but apparently a new study has unveiled a curious new fact about cows: They align themselves with Earth's magnetic field. In a the paper "Magnetic alignment in grazing and resting cattle and deer" -- published in an August issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -- a team of German zoologists used Google Earth to examine images of 8,510 cattle and 2,974 deer in ...
The Humboldt squid beak: Diamond-sharp mystery of the briny deep (1)
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2 months, 2 weeks
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There are many weird things about the giant Humboldt squid, but here's one of the strangest: Its beak. The squid's beak is one of the hardest organic substances in existence -- such that the sharp point can slice through a fish or whale like a Ginsu knife. Yet the beak is attached to squid flesh that itself is the texture of jello. How precisely does a gelatinous animal safely wield such a razor-sharp weapon? Why ...
collision detection: The Age of Awareness: My latest feature for the New York Times Magazine (2)
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Games Without Frontiers: How Videogames Blind Us With Science (2)
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Wired Top Stories (4271)
2 months, 2 weeks
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A few years ago, Constance Steinkuehler -- a game academic at the University of Wisconsin -- was spending 12 hours a day playing Lineage, the online world game. She was, as she puts it, a "siege princess," running 150-person raids on hellishly difficult bosses. Most of her guild members were teenage boys. But they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them ...
Clive Thompson on Why Urban Farming Isn't Just for Foodies (2)
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2 months, 3 weeks
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This year, Carol Nissen's crops include mesclun, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, and assorted herbs. When she sits down to dine, she's often eating food grown with her own two hands. But Nissen isn't tilling the soil on a farm. She's a Web designer who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey — one of the most cramped, concrete-laden landscapes in the nation. Nissen's vegetables thrive in pots and boxes crammed into her house and in wee plots ...
Games Without Frontiers: Fun Way to Lose Weight: Turn Dieting Into an RPG (2)
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Wired Top Stories (4271)
3 months, 1 week
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A friend of mine recently slimmed down on Weight Watchers. She joined two months ago, and in just a couple of weeks, she'd shed 10 pounds. She'd been trying for a year to lose weight, but nothing worked -- until now. Why did Weight Watchers work so well? For a really fascinating reason: because it isn't a normal diet. It's something more. Something fun. It's an RPG. The Weight Watchers program is designed precisely like ...
Back to the Grind in WoW — and Loving Every Tedious Minute (1)
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Wired Top Stories (4271)
3 months, 3 weeks
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Getting into World of Warcraft for the first time means hours of grinding: performing the same tasks over and over to “level up” a character. But far from being boring, grinding is one of the great unsung joys of gaming. Last week, I finally decided to start playing World of Warcraft again. And you know what that means: Exciting medieval adventures! Chess-like strategizing with guildmates over raid techniques! And, of course, grinding. Hours upon hours ...
Killer Gamer Asks, 'Where Have All the Bodies Gone?' (1)
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Wired Top Stories (4271)
5 months, 3 weeks
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Something quite interesting happens in the first few minutes of Ninja Gaiden II: The dead people don't vanish. About five minutes into the game, I finished my first battle, and it was a grisly spectacle of carnage. I'd killed about seven guys, and their corpses lay scattered about. Then I went around the corner to save my progress at the "sacred statue." When I turned around ... the bodies were still there. All seven of ...
Clive Thompson on How Man-Made Noise May Be Altering Earth's Ecology (1)
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5 months, 3 weeks
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Bernie Krause listens to nature for a living. The 69-year-old is a field recording scientist: He heads into the wilderness to document the noises made by native fauna — crickets chirping in the Amazon rain forest, frogs croaking in the Australian outback. But Krause has noticed something alarming. The natural sound of the world is vanishing. He'll be deep inside the Amazon, recording that cricket, but when he listens carefully he also hears machinery: The ...
Why audiophiles are dying out (2)
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10 months, 2 weeks
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About a year ago, I blogged about the "loudness wars" in music: How the overuse of compression is killing the dynamic range of albums these days. Compression, to recap, is the technique of reducing the acoustic difference between the quietest and loudest parts of a song. In the old, old days of the 70s, most rock albums had very quiet and very loud parts -- they weren't very compressed. But beginning in the 90s, record ...
The legal fight over the government's access to your outboard brain (1)
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10 months, 2 weeks
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There's a fascinating piece in today's New York Times about a new legal fight: Should border guards be able to search through the contents of your laptop when you're entering the US? Apparently this question is being decided, as we speak, by several federal courts. The administration argues that yes, it should be allowed to look through your hard drive, partly for practical reasons -- for example, they've discovered people with child pornography crossing the ...
Natalie Portman, neuroscientist (1)
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10 months, 3 weeks
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Every once in a while, you run across celebrity profiles that attempt to demonstrate that not all celebrities are as dumb as fenceposts. You'll read about the fact that, for example, Brad Pitt is deeply engaged by architecture, or that David Duchovny almost finished his literature PhD, or that Christy Turlington studied Eastern philosophy at NYU. But I think I've just stumbled upon the single most impressive bit of celebuscholarship yet: "Frontal Lobe Activation during ...
