Comments on: The Computational Side-Effects Of Gaming

By: arqueturus

arqueturus — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:37:13 +0000

You fail, sort it out. Although, do these guys ship to blighty?

Also, come back to the epic lag machine. We need direction.

By: Jim Rossignol

Jim Rossignol — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:43:42 +0000

Nope.

By: arqueturus

arqueturus — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:39:51 +0000

Jim, do you have a UK published release for your book yet?

By: Andrew Doull

Andrew Doull — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:21:52 +0000

Imagine where a game (or genre of games) was dependent on ever improving computer processing power… do you think that would lead to some kind of incentive to improve CPU speed and reduce die size?

I think people forget how much good games have already done…

By: Ixis

Ixis — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:54:21 +0000

freerice.com?

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:47:58 +0000

The competition thing is certainly interesting, too. Plus, if you get the hang of composing small-scale abilities into larger ones, you could harness things like creativity to make much larger, more complex creative works.

Kind of like (though it pains me to say it) Spore. Individual creativity creates an artificially unique universe. Nice.

By: Jim Rossignol

Jim Rossignol — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:42:59 +0000

Games also supply human and competitive elements, like the connection people feel in the ESP game.

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:31:09 +0000

It’s hard to get true, useful computation out of the gamer, surely? Unless it’s something simple, but large-scale like comparison, opinion, decision – simple things that we can’t emulate with AI yet, for example.

I think that’s the thing – we can’t compute faster than true distributed computers, but we can do tricky, simple little cognitive things that could wind up being useful somewhere. Things like The Cutest (http://thecutest.info/) allows massive aggregation of things, but with a real, human output.

The question, then, is why make that into a game, rather than just an exercise like The Cutest? Presumably, because we’d rather be shooting cute images than clicking on them. Which is cool enough.

By: wcaypahwat

wcaypahwat — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 15:31:54 +0000

KG – they just bought out a 150th anniversary issue, and listed everyone who’s ever contributed, I noticed your name in the list.

By: Down Rodeo

Down Rodeo — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 15:09:35 +0000

Regarding what you said about using the spare clock cycles, I was part of that BBC thing for calculating possible futures under global warming. I had it running in the background whilst I played CoD2 :)

By: Kieron Gillen

Kieron Gillen — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:46:08 +0000

wcaypahwat: Why do you ask? I think I did a couple of really small things. The one I remember was a news piece about the Freeplay festival I was speaking at.

By: Jim Rossignol

Jim Rossignol — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:18:16 +0000

One of the themes of, ahem, my forthcoming book is a discussion of how games should be valued, and whether giving them a purpose outside of entertainment is a good or necessary idea. My natural impulse as a writer is to talk about that Added Value Academia, but as a gamer I’m not sure I should give a damn.