Month: February 2012

Video Games Should Escape Their Environs

One of the things I really like is when video games bleed over into the “real” world such as the Mass Effect 3 datapad app which would send the user text messages from the game’s characters (presumably to announce when the game actually gets a decent ending).

A more extreme/bizarre/cool version of this occurs in Japanese dating sims such as Love Plus where the in-game virtual girlfriends send email and text messages and the game plays out largely in real time.

A silly related tool I found a couple years ago is GamerDNA.com’s XBOX Voice feature. Create an account, feed GamerDNA your XBOX Live ID, and it will construct a daily blog entry written from your XBOX’s perspective. Don’t game for a few days? Your XBOX will get increasingly bitchy and whiny. Earn a few achievements, and it extolls your gaming godness (you can see an archive of my XBOX’s recent daily updates here.)

I’m surprised we don’t see more tools like this (aside from the cost of providing them). For example, Bethesda foolishly seems to want to enter the MMO arena with an Elder Scrolls MMO. Personally, I think that goes entirely against the grain of what has made the Elder Scrolls successful. What I would like to see, however,is an autogenerated journal feature where I could push out accumulated data on what my character has been doing and this would be converted into an epic chronicle of all of my adventures, complete with screenshots. I could then share that or use it as a jumping off point for fan fiction, etc.

Some MMOs have started to go down this route but then punked out. Champions Online had a number of social networking features built in, so you could natively post text and screen shots to Twitter and other services. That was interesting, but like most such services if you actually use it, you just end up polluting your timeline with crap very few other people want to see. I saw a few people create Twitter accounts for their character and Twitter that way, which was nice.

What would have been much cooler, however, would have been a dozen or so comic book templates that corresponded to the various quests and story arcs in the game. Then when a player finished a quest or reached a significant portion in a story arc, the system could have taken a screen shot and pushed that out server side to the company’s servers.

As time goes by, then, the player ends up with a comic book depicting his or her exploits in comic book form in the game world which, again, can be linked to and become a jumping off point for fan fic, remixing and other activities surrounding the game.

With a setting like modern day super-heroes, SMS messages and emails sent to the player from in-game characters could be awesome. Champions Online had a nemesis system (the last time I played, it kinda sucked, but it was one of the few innovative ideas that CO had). An email from my nemesis needling me for cowardice when I hadn’t logged in for a few days or bragging about the beat down he put on me the other night or threatening revenge for the most recent thwarting of his evil schemes would have frigging rocked.

One Vote Doesn’t Make Any Difference

I don’t vote in U.S. elections for a variety of reasons. There is a criticism against voting that goes like this — there is a non-zero chance that a given election could be decided by a single vote, and that would apparently be the non-voters fault for not showing up at the polls.

There are lists going around the Internet of elections won by a single vote (or in some cases a tie). Many such lists are filled with completely fabricated elections, but it is certainly the case that reported results of an election can be a tie or a victory of just one vote.

The problem, of course, is that in most cases a single vote doesn’t really matter in these cases either. Why? Because unless we’re talking about a very small group of people voting, such as for some rural office where the number of voters may be in the low hundreds, elections that come down to just a single vote or even a small number of votes are statistically ties — the supposedly single vote that sways everything is well within the margin of error of whatever method is being used to tabulate the ballots.

For example, in the United States many jurisdictions have laws that if the results from a mechanically or computer tabulated vote shows a candidate losing to another by a small enough margin, there has to be a recount. Frequently that recount is required to be done by hand.

But researchers at Clemson University and Rice University found that hand counting of ballots after an election results in a margin of error of up to two percent.

Based on the processing of the ballots, the researchers found a one-half to 1 percent error rate for the “read and mark” method, and up to a 2 percent error rate for the “sort and stack” method.

Byrne noted that although these error rates may seem insignificant, the margins of error can make all the difference in close elections.

“While an error rate of 1 or 2 percent may seem small, recent elections — like the Iowa caucuses just last month — have had margins of victory small enough that a counting error could play a role,” Byrne said.

This is why the debate over who won Florida in 2000 was so ridiculous. The final vote count had George W. Bush winning by 537 votes over Al Gore out of 5,963,070 votes cast. The correct answer is that it is impossible to know who won Florida in 2000 since there’s no way the vote counting methodology in Florida was precise enough to count votes to the level of precision needed (especially given what we learned later about the odd standards and methods that were used for some of the hand recounts).