s7r4t4's HardestLevel

Meh. I'm coo wit dat.

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 09:01:50 GMT

So I was watching this:

And of course after that I had to go an Google 'Ryan Reynolds' to find out just who this guy who might play both Deadpool and the Green Lantern is. (Lousy memory for names and faces; bite me.)

Meh. I can live with that. But somehow I just don't see him as the GL... Maybe it's because the Justice League cartoon has fixed him in my mind as being black... But he'd make an awesome Deadpool.

Cool stuff

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:51:38 GMT

Cosplay's a big thing in Asia (I blame the Japanese; not that I'm complaining) and it has its nerdy roots in Star Trek conventions in the US too. And where would we be without all the cool props which go with it.

But trust WETA (the guys behind all the props and sets for Lord of the Rings) to go and 1-up everybody.

I have... warthog envy.

edit: Top picture taken from the Bungie blog where they strut some of the gifts fans get them. Warthog pictures can be found here.

Seven second itch

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:25:13 GMT

Someday, I will find a blog theme which lasts more than a week. Until then...

But you know what, maybe I'll find that I really, really like dark blue North Star high-tops.

Check back in a week.

+1 Sanctions

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:51:23 GMT

We're probably pretty familiar with the idea of violent video games being banned or strictly controlled. Actually, if you're Singaporean, you've walked the 'banning violent video games' road. (Mass Effect anyone? Oh come on, I'm sure you remember the ridiculous hype over a few seconds of non-explicit lesbian alien sex in a single possible outcome the game offered.)

Whether you think violent video games should be banned, given ratings or tightly controlled might depend on several factors. Such as whether you're actually old enough to legally buy that M17 video game. Or whether you're a parent. Or even on your views on the right to freedom of speech. But all that aside, there's one undeniable fact that film has long known and video games seem to need to get out in to the open: Violence sells. It makes mega bucks. Oh, and so does sex.

Which is partly (or largely...) why after it's automatic reaction to ban 'adult themed' games like Mass Effect, the Singaporean government instated its own video game rating system. This cleared their concience to allow more grown-up games in Singapore which made lots of money while keeping young, impressionable children safe. Which made most of the gamers above the age of 18 very happy because they could stop having to worry about police kicking in the door while they were playing games involving lesbian aliens.

(Actually, given how ignorant most parents are of ratings, starting a rating system probably made a lot of gamers under 18 very happy too...)

Anyway, now that the worst of our rating wars are behind us, it's interesting to watch them being carried out in other countries. For example Germany which has recently been debating the idea of completely banning violent video games. Unlike Singapore which is a small market with a relatively new gaming industry, Germany is home to some big gaming guns. Crytek, known for its Crysis series, has gone on record stating that is the German government decides to ban violent video games, then they will see it as "...essentially like banning the German artists that create them. If the German creative community can't effectively participate in one of the most important cultural mediums of our future, we will be forced to relocate to other countries.”

Owch.

Germany has had its share of school-shooting disasters and not surprisingly, pushed much of the blame on video games. I guess when there's the threat of real violence and harm, there's a lot more pressure for a government to be seen doing something about it.

Though there is the question of whether a more effective course of action would be to exercise stricter gun control laws.

On a completely unrelated note, look! Mass Effect 2 trailer from E3!! (No clearly lesbian aliens. Sorry guys.)

Disclaimer: if you've seen this post before on www.gc-asia-blog.sg, don't freak out. I'm not plagiarising. I'm the same writer on both blogs. I just felt this post was worth tossing onto my Hardest Level blog too.

Comics

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 12:49:52 GMT

I must admit I don't play as wide a variety of video games as I would like to. School and family commitments make it a little tricky spending time with my 360 and having had a full-time job all summer hasn't helped at all. So I've been falling back on what I've been doing for a long time. I've been reading comics.

There's plenty of good webcomics out there and it's nice that I can get my graphic novel fix for free online. (Though at the end of the day, nothing beats hard copy.) In particular I've been enjoying Ctrl-Alt-Del.

It started off at a gaming comic and in many ways, it had remained that. The main character's a massive gaming addict and the comic is sprinkled with pithy comics poking fun at video games.

But I do also really like that the comic has moved beyond simply being a gaming comic to having one with actual character development. I know that's a word we bandy about a lot but in this case, there's no other way to describe what's happened with the comic. Especially since the comic's not story-driven (it's about two geeks/nerds, a girl and a robot) and what they do. So really, it's what the characters do and knowing them which makes it so enjoyable. (Which isn't to say that the stories of the escapdees they get up to aren't plenty entertaining). It's really different from comics like the Pheonix Requiem where finding out what happens next is really the comics main draw.

Then you get comics like Lackadaisy which are a lovely blend of great charcters, amazing artwork and setting and a definnite idea that the story is going somewhere (only you don't quite know where.)

That being said, Ctrl-Alt-Del and the Pheonix Requiem update several times a week and Lackadaisy comes up with a new comic once every... uh... Okay, I don't think there's a regular updating schedule.

Well, now you know what I'm doing when I'm not playing Dragonica... :p

Stemcell Computing

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:10:53 GMT

First the Wii, now the... Zii? Yeah, wierd names don't have much to do with this post but I just want to point out if anyone comes up aith something called the 'Pii', I'm outta here.

I was clicking through the Google news page this morning when I saw something about Creative's Zii EGG. And then there was lots of noise about it being the world's first Stemcell Computer. My first thought was: self-replicating computers!! Since Stemcells are meant to be at least pluripotent (able to differentiate into several different types of cells) so it seemed reasonable to assume that Creative was about to create computers which could self-differnetiate according to task and eventually form a central organim which would become sentient and decide to take over the world. Being a Singaporean (Creative is a Singaporean company), I was mildly disturbed that my home country might be partly responsible for the coming robot appocalypse. (Our government also supports scientists fooling around with bio-engineering research. I'm not rulling out the possibility we might have something to do with a zombie appocalypse either. Though Korea might beat us to that.) So like any happy nerd, I set forth to Google and Wiki 'Stemcell computer'.

I was sorely dissapointed. The first page of results on Google were all reports from various tech sites talking about the Zii EGG. And as far as I can tell, they're all as confused as I am. Wikipedia sent similar redirects. So I turned to the Zii official site. It seems to tell me that the reason it's called a Stemcell Comuter is because, well, the chip is really, really small. 'Nano-sized', they claim and capable of running 'media-rich applications, superior multi-tasking, cutting edge 3D processing and support for HD graphics, audio and video.' Okay; so it's really small and it does lots of stuff. I'm not a huge computer nerd but I'm pretty sure most microchips can do lots and lots of stuff too. Supposedly one can alos customize a range of function-specific devices by changing the chip-set configuration.

Uh... right.

Okay, it sounds pretty cool and I'm starting to see some of the rationale behind why they named it 'Stemcell computer' but it feels like overkill. Nobody knows what the hell Stemcell Computers are and it's going to be a while before anyone figures out. What is Creative doing churning out a weird, pretentious name like this? Are they trying to differentiate themselves from the iPod Touch which is a definite rival? If so, I question the logic of coming out with a distracting label like 'stemcell'.

As for the device itself? Well, it's basically another media device a little like the Zune or iPod Touch but with the capability to be upgraded in to a phone with the right chip set (pluripotency?) The specs came out a couple of days ago when Creative let a couple of reviewers try the Zii EGG out. 3.5' true-color capacitive 10-point multitouch screen, X-Fi audio, 32 GC of internal NAND Flash, 256 MB of RAM, HDTV support through HD cable, forward and rear facing camera, WiFi and Bluetooth enabled, an SDHC slot supporting up to a 32 GB card, USB 2.0 Mini-B, built-in speaker and microphone and support for Plaszma OS and Andriod.

So hardware-wise it certainly looks like it could stand up to the other smartphones and media players out there. But at the end of the day, what makes or breaks the Zii EGG's popularity is going to be the number of third-party applications which come out for it.

Full of win

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:54:46 GMT

Well, I did a blogpost here titled 'Chinatown Wars' which basically talks about how the Chinese government has (yet again) moved to restrict the kind of content Chinese gamers have access to. And as usual, reasons cited are that video games will lead to the moral degradation of society, the rise of violence, the undermining of traditional values, blah de blah de blah...

In case it's not blatantly obvious already, I don't buy the whole "video games cause violence" thing. I also don't like the fact that they get blamed for all kinds of social ills simply because our parents didn't play them and they turned out so much better. (If we believed to every older generation's whining about how the youngsters are decadent and inferior, it'd be a miracle the human race made it past, say, the first five generations.)

Anyway, back to video game violence, my favourite hobby horse. Are video games violent? Uh, yeah, duh. Not all of them of course but quite a few (OK, maybe more than "a few"...) Do they cause violence? Uh, that's a big jump to take. Causation requires that the playing of violent video games directly results in the carrying out of violent action because the video game was played. I have a very simple counter argument to that: there are literally millions of gamers, thousands of whom have played hundreds of hours of games which would be classified as 'violent'. Yet most of them manage to live without whipping out an AK47 and gunning down that annoying person found almost anywher who steals your parking spot/place in a line/ the last cookie from the cookie jar.

Yeah, there are cases of students who go crazy and kill their classmates and teachers and are then revealed to be avid gamers of violent first-person shooters. But at this point, gaming is so prevalent that pointing out a crazy shooter is a gamer and thus concluding games cause violence is like seeing a bank robber drive away and concluding that learning to drive leads to criminal tendencies. Correlation does not equal causation. Maybe the crazies are drawn to violent video games but the fact that gamers haven't risen up en masse to take out the world's irritants with sub-machine guns strongly suggests video games do not beget violence.

At this point someone might throw out the considerable body of reasearch which seems to point to t a strong correlation between media violence (and therefore presumably, video games) and actual violence. This person would be correct in acknowledging the existence of such findings but all this research has one problem: they were done in lab conditions. And the greatest drawback of lab conditions are that they're too neat; they don't take into account all the niggling little interactions which result in eventual behaviour in the real world. Some research inferred an increase in violent behaviour based on patient's vital signs after engaging with a violent piece of media. How exactly do dilated pupils, a faster heart rate and sweat cause violence? Isn't it more likely that these symptoms might be the effect of violence rather than the cause?

The truth is, the relationship between violence and video games is a complex entity which depends on many other factors such as the mindset of the player, emotional state, reinforcement of anti-social behavior in real life and a host of other things which I don't think anyone could list fully. When you pause to think about it, such complexity seems fairly obvious. Why then am I making such a fuss about it?

I admit, if such narrow views of violence and video games were just held by non-gamers and nothing came of it, I wouldn't really care. It'd just be so much noise. The problem is some of these people are clearly in influential positions. I could bring up Leland Yee, a Californian Senator who has repeatedly pushed for the criminalization of selling mature-rated video games to minors and continues to do so despite the host of other more pressing economic problems the state has on its plate. (This raises a whole host of issues regarding the fact that he seems to be sending out the message that parents should ignore the labels on what their kids play/watch/read because the state will be watching that for them. As a citizen of a benign dictatorship, I never thought I'd say this about the Land of the Free, but Nanny State much?) Then there's Jack Thompson of course (finally, disbarrment!) and the example I mentioned at the start of this post with the Chinese government. (In true Communist style of believeing everyone should be equally miserable, they are at least being equally stifling to all forms of expression...)

Since any rant should have at least some substantiation, let me quote some things from an amicus brief Leland Yee submitted:

"...new data shows that the intensity of inter-active video games may be habituating and that 2-3 hour sessions of intense interactions with video games raise adrenaline levels in children and produces ex-tended physiological arousal. In the medical com-munity concern has been raised at prolonged and regularly repeated states of adrenalized arousal and hyper-vigilance involved in children watching violent video games and the possible harmful effects on still developing bodies and brains."

Pysiological arousal? Measured by what? Increased heart and respiration rate? Sweating? Gee, that sounds like what happens when kids run around. Which they're capable of doing all the time. *sigh* This is the kind of logic that supports the video game bashing the gamer community has to put up with. Even more exasperating is the fact that a lot of other concerns such as the breeding of fear of a negative worldview could be achieved by watching TV. I'm not trying to say that just because people seem to have given up bashing television violence that they should stop knocking video games (that's dangerously close to a straw man argument). Rather it is frustrating that the video game detractors don't seem to realize that their arguments and accusations are the same, tired old phrases which have been used against just about every single media innovation since the printing press.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" (A post-modernist view, perhaps, and not entirely one I share but it seemed appropriate some how.)

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 04:40:54 GMT

Hi everyone! I'm just getting started on HardestLevel... Drop me a comment if you've got some ideas on what to do first - or just to say, "Hi!"