Just another nerd.
One of the best computer games I ever played was Bill Budget’s Pinball Construction Set. Today, Visual Pinball takes that idea far beyond what anyone imagined was possible in 1983.
Visual Pinball allows for extremely detailed recreations of existing pinball machines, and for some innovative and very fun new pinball machines. The graphics are just amazing, and clearly a lot of pinball fans put insane hours in reproducing their favorite machines.
Caleb Chung, the guy who created the Furby, has spent the last five years working on a sequel, which will be available in time for the 2006 holiday season — the Pleo,
It’ll retail for about $200, but it is equipped with 40 sensors and 14 servo joints controlled by algorithms designed to make it react in a lifelike manner to its environment.
How well do they succeed? Check out the video of Pleo’s debut at DEMO 2006.
I’ll take two.
Back in 2005, our grandstanding governor Jennifer Granholm called for the legislature to pass a bill to ban the sale of “violent” video games to minors. The legislature granted her request, and the bill was signed into law in September of 2005.
This month, U.S. District Court Judge George Caram Steeh issued a permanent injunction against the ban, finding it unconstitutional. In his decision to issue the injunction, Steeh wrote that,
The interactive, or functional aspect, in video games can be said to enhance the expressive elements even more than other media by drawing the player closer to the characters and becoming more involved in the plot of the game than by simply watching a movie or television show. It would be impossible to separate the functional aspects of a video game from the expressive, inasmuch as they are so closely intertwined and dependent on each other in creating the virtual experience.
That’s a fancy way of saying that the interactive nature of video games does not — as Michigan had argued — provide them with less First Amendment protection than other media, such as novels or movies.
Although the Michigan law would have only prevented the sale of games to minors, Granholm showed her true intent in taking on the craptastic “25 to Life” (which Gamespot describes as “a lifelessly generic shooter that, at times, feels like Max Payne without the fun.”)
In an official press release Granholm argued that not only should the game not be sold to minors, but that it should not be stocked at all by Michigan retailers,
Governor Jennifer M. Granholm last week called on retailers across Michigan to support a national boycott of the video game “25 to Life†by not selling the game in their stores. In a letter to the retailers, Granholm said taking the game off store shelves is a critical step in the fight to keep inappropriate and dangerous forms of entertainment out of the hands of our children.
“Taking this game off your shelves is not only the best way to ensure that it does not end up in the hands of children, it also sends a message of support to our law enforcement community that we will not support those who would profit from the production and sale of such games, no matter what the intended audience,” Granholm wrote.
Right, and having Michigan cable companies boycott HBO is the best way to make sure children don’t watch “The Sopranos.”
Sources:
Breaking: Michigan Violent Games Law Thrown Out. GameDaily, April 3, 2006.
Governor Granholm Continues to Fight to Keep Violent and Sexually Explicit Video Games Away from Children. Press Release, March 15, 2006.
The Los Angeles Times recently profiled Cliff Atkinson author of Beyond Bullet Points, which advocates for replacing the dull-as-nails barrage of bullet points PowerPoint style with a more narrative, visual storytelling format.
Since I read Beyond Bullet Points I’ve used its ideas in putting together a few presentations with varying degrees of success, and I’ve recommended the book and method to everyone who will listen. Lately, though, I’m having second thoughts, and the profile of Atkinson reinforced those doubts.
More and more I find myself preferring Edward Tufte’s harsh but accurate The Cognitive Style of Power Point. Tufte essentially argues that Power Point-style presentations are inherently evil and should be avoided at all costs.
The LA Times reproduces some of the slides that Atkinson famously helped prepare for the plaintiff in the successful lawsuit against Merck over Vioxx. I agree with Atkinson’s view that the slide after slide of bullet points are just wrong on a number of levels. But, on the other hand, the slides that the LA Times uses as examples of his technique clearly use striking graphical images to emotionally manipulate the audience.
Atkinson trumpets the three-act narrative structure in his book, but our experience with mass media suggests that this approach is just as easily used to obfuscate and misdirect. After all the most effective presentations that use Atkinson’s methods are television commercials which are very effective in communicating messages in ways designed to bypass the audience’s critical thinking or skepticism.
Atkinson and critics of Tufte respond that it is imply unrealistic to expect people to abandon Power Point, so why not do make the Power Points as effective as possible. This reminds me of something I’ve heard in a number of contexts from a large number of people which claims that people simply don’t have time to seriously engage issues anymore, so you have to dumb the issue down to the level where people will pay attention and take some sort of action.
Perhaps, but this doesn’t at all address Tufte’s point that,
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.
So, if Tufte is correct, arguing “well we’re going to use it anyway, so we might as well have visually appealing presentations” is akin to arguing, “well we’re going to be making decisions based on suspect analyses anyway, so we might as well watch visually appealing presentations to support our poor analytical process.”
The Onion published a hilarious World of Warcraft piece, Baby, You Mean The World of Warcraft To Me, with lines like,
There is no other way to put it: You take my breath bar away.
. . .
Please, baby, if you leave, you will increase by 32 percent the chance of doing direct damage to my heart.
John Lott continues to be an embarrassment to gun rights supporters, this time filing a lawsuit against University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt over Levitt’s bestselling book, Freakonomics.
I haven’t read Freakonomics but apparently the book claims that other researchers have been unable to reproduce Lott’s findings about the extent to which concealed carry laws lead to a decrease in crime. Lott charges that this is not true and that by claiming it is, Levitt is defaming him.
The lawsuit turns on the definition of the word “replicate” with Lott claiming that those who have not found a decrease in crime where concealed carry laws have been enacted did not “replicate” his studies since they relied on different methodologies.
Apparently Lott doesn’t think the last few years worth of revelations about the flawed methodology in his book More Guns, Less Crime and his bizarre personal behavior haven’t damaged his reputation enough, so he’s hoping to drive the nail in the coffin with a frivolous lawsuit.
Every new item about Lott brings me closer and closer to wondering if he and Michael Bellesisles weren’t separated at birth.
Source:
Best-seller leads scholar to file lawsuit. Michael Higgins, Chicago Tribune, April 11, 2006.