Category: Articles

Since I last wrote about “so­cial gam­ing”, my term for gam­ing as a medi­um for so­cial­iza­tion (as op­posed to gam­ing for the sake of gam­ing), my opin­ions on the topic have changed quite a bit. For clar­i­fi­ca­tion, I am still talk­ing about video gam­ing, and my goals are still more or less the same: to use video games as a medi­um or an ex­cuse, re­al­ly, to bring peo­ple to­geth­er and cre­ate so­cial bonds. Video games are al­ready quite suc­cess­ful at do­ing this- the aim is to make ex­plic­it this de­sired ef­fect and there­fore be able to op­ti­mize our gam­ing ac­tiv­i­ties to­ward this end.

What so­cial si­t­u­a­tions ac­tu­al­ly arise when you in­vite some friends over to “play some video games”? The most in­ter­est­ing sce­nar­io oc­curs when you have a mix of “hard­core” and “ca­su­al” gamers. For me, the strik­ing dif­fer­ence be­tween the­se groups of peo­ple is not gam­ing abil­i­ty (although the dif­fer­ence is sig­nif­i­cant) but rather the at­ti­tude that they take to­ward gam­ing. As I men­tioned above, hard­core gamers play the game pri­mar­i­ly to play the game. They are con­cerned with in-game achieve­ment: get­ting bet­ter scores, more kills, high­er APM, that sort of thing. Ca­su­al gamers pri­mar­i­ly see the game as a fo­cus for so­cial­iza­tion. The game it­self takes more of a back­ground role.

This caus­es some prob­lems for so­cial­iza­tion, of course. Hard­core gamers are often unaware that their com­pet­i­tive­ness makes games un-fun for non-com­pet­i­tive play­ers; in fact, com­pet­i­tive games are al­most built to be un-fun for poor play­ers. The ma­jor­i­ty of fun in Halo or Call of Du­ty comes from get­ting kills on other play­ers; if you can’t do that, run­ning around and dy­ing ev­ery few sec­onds could hard­ly be con­sid­ered to be fun. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, gamers who are too fo­cused on the game won’t be able to de­vote men­tal time to hold­ing con­ver­sa­tions (out­side the game) or other­wise so­cial­iz­ing with the par­ty.

One pos­si­ble “rem­e­dy” to this “prob­lem” is to en­cour­age peo­ple to play co-op games in­stead of pure­ly com­pet­i­tive ones. (It’s worth not­ing that this isn’t so much a so­cial prob­lem as it is my prob­lem. I could sidestep the is­sue en­tire­ly by not us­ing video games as a so­cial medi­um, but I think it’s an in­ter­est­ing op­por­tu­ni­ty and one wor­thy of study.) My newest ex­am­ple of a co-op game which en­cour­ages so­cial­iza­tion is Atom Zom­bie Smash­er, a po­ten­tial­ly co-op game about (what else?) killing zom­bies. Look for­ward to some anal­y­sis and anec­dotes about play­ing this game next time.

(Up­date: in ret­ro­spect, I have re­al­ized that this ar­ti­cle is per­haps not so well writ­ten. Ex­pect some­thing more use­ful and co­her­ent soon!)

Lin­ux seems like the per­fect so­lu­tion for the new brand of portable PCs, net­books. It’s ef­fi­cient, re­quires few re­sources, and can run most if not all of the pro­grams one usu­al­ly runs on such small com­put­ers – word pro­cess­ing, email, web brows­ing, and so on. Large, com­plex soft­ware pack­ages that re­quire Win­dows to run per­form abysmal­ly on low-pow­er com­put­ers like net­books, so ef­fec­tive­ly the need to run Win­dows is nul­li­fied.

Why, then, do con­sumers (and re­view­ers!) choose Win­dows over Lin­ux for net­books? Read more…

There’s been a lot of talk re­cent­ly about why PC gam­ing is “doomed”, main­ly be­cause of the ev­er-grow­ing amount of PC game pira­cy. I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly think that PC gam­ing is doomed at all, although I do think there will be a sig­nif­i­cant shift in the way the PC game mar­ket works – to­wards a more con­trolled dis­tri­bu­tion mod­el, per­haps, like Steam.

This is what I think about pira­cy, how­ev­er. It’s a self-sus­tain­ing cy­cle, in a way: high video game prices en­cour­age gamers to pi­rate games in­stead of buy­ing them, “forc­ing” video game man­u­fac­tur­ers to raise prices or keep prices high in order to not lose rev­enue. Those high prices in turn con­tin­ue to en­cour­age pira­cy. This loop is not nec­es­sar­i­ly un­break­able, though there are sev­er­al fac­tors that, in my opin­ion, con­tribute to its sus­te­nance: Read more…

This is a neat trick I found in Fire­fox. This works at least in Fire­fox 3 and may al­so work in Fire­fox 2; I do, how­ev­er, en­cour­age you to up­grade if you’re still us­ing Fire­fox 2, as the third re­lease brings about many need­ed en­hance­ments in per­for­mance and mem­o­ry usage. Us­ing a book­mark, one can turn the lo­ca­tion bar in­to a sort-of com­mand parser, there­by cre­at­ing a sort of “key­board short­cut” for that book­mark. This in ef­fect al­lows you to cre­ate your own cus­tom “key­board short­cuts” or “lo­ca­tion bar com­mands”. Here’s an ex­am­ple of how it works. Say I want to cre­ate a short­cut for Google Im­age Search. I can go to the Im­age Search page, and right click the box, and se­lect “Add a key­word for this search”:

En­ter some name for your search; the name doesn’t mat­ter. (Al­ter­na­tive­ly, you could sim­ply cre­ate a new book­mark; its tar­get (“lo­ca­tion”) should be some­thing like http://www.google.com/search?q=%s, where %s rep­re­sents what will be searched on. Right-click the book­mark you just cre­at­ed and click “prop­er­ties”.) This di­alog box will pop up:

In “key­word”, type the “com­mand” that you wish to use to ac­cess this short­cut. In this case, I would use some­thing like “imgs” or “is”. One-let­ter key­words do not seem to work very well. On­ce you have en­tered the key­word and closed the di­alog, you can type in the lo­ca­tion bar (press CTRL+L to get there quick­ly):

imgs cute pup­pies

Press en­ter, and be­hold your search un­fold­ing be­fore your eyes.

Here is the up­dat­ed ver­sion of my pre­vi­ous au­then­ti­cat­ing/for­ward­ing Squid 3 con­fig. It adds some things and fix­es some things. In par­tic­u­lar, the peer ex­clu­sion rules from the pre­vi­ous con­fig were not work­ing – this one should cor­rect­ly not use the par­ent prox­ies when query­ing “lo­cal ad­dress­es”. As be­fore, the con­fig­u­ra­tion file con­tains two proxy servers for load bal­anc­ing; it can be ex­tend­ed easi­ly to in­clude more. Read more…

Last time I wrote about try­ing to find ca­su­al games for medi­um/large-group so­cial events. We can split mul­ti­play­er video gam­ing in­to a cou­ple of vague­ly-de­fined cat­e­gories; I’m go­ing to use the term “ca­su­al” or “so­cial gam­ing” to refer to medi­um-scale so­cial gath­er­ings that in­volve video gam­ing; hard­core gam­ing, of course, is all about the game; and we might per­haps call the last group “LAN par­ty gam­ing” to indi­cate a mid­dle ground be­tween ca­su­al gam­ing and su­per-in­tense gam­ing.

It is for the first cat­e­go­ry, so­cial gam­ing, that I sug­gest a game to­day: Heroes of Might and Mag­ic III. Read more…

My school us­es an NTLM-au­then­ti­cat­ing proxy server, and this caus­es prob­lems with lots of ap­pli­ca­tions which don’t sup­port proxy servers. Many, many so­lu­tions have been pro­posed to this prob­lem, but I’ll fo­cus on one that I find par­tic­u­lar­ly ap­peal­ing: set­ting up a non-au­then­ti­cat­ing per­son­al proxy server which for­wards re­quests to the main proxy server.

Up­date: use the new ver­sion of this con­fig file – it works bet­ter. Read more…

I found to­day that I was hav­ing prob­lems launch­ing Call of Du­ty 2 on Win­dows Vis­ta. I could not start ei­ther the sin­gle or mul­ti­play­er: both would crash and the Vis­ta “this pro­gram has stopped work­ing” di­alog box would pop up. A quick search on the In­ter­nets told me that this was def­i­nite­ly a com­mon prob­lem, and with the help of some pret­ty ob­scure fo­rum posts, I fi­nal­ly fig­ured it out. I’m go­ing to sum­ma­rize my so­lu­tion here for fu­ture ref­er­ence:

Sys­tem en­vi­ron­ment:

• nVidia graph­ics card
• Win­dows Vis­ta Home Premi­um 32-bit
• 2 GB RAM
• In­te­grat­ed “HD” au­dio

The so­lu­tion for me:

1. Re­mem­ber to set CoD2 to com­pat­i­bil­i­ty mode with Win­dows XP SP2! You can do this by right-click­ing the short­cut and se­lect­ing “Prop­er­ties”, then open­ing the “Com­pat­i­bil­i­ty” tab at the top.
2. First tried up­dat­ing Di­rec­tX 9. Vis­ta users should note that Di­rec­tX 9 and Di­rec­tX 10, while both com­ing pre-in­stalled on Vis­ta, are sep­a­rate com­po­nents. You should still up­date to the lat­est Di­rec­tX 9 even if you have Di­rec­tX 10. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, while a good first step, this didn’t work for me.
3. Then, added “+set com_in­tro­played 1″ to the end of the short­cuts. You can do this by open­ing the short­cut prop­er­ties (see step 0) and adding those char­ac­ters, with­out quotes, to the end of the “Tar­get:” box, so that the full line looks like: “C:\Pro­gram Files\Ac­tivi­sion\Call of Du­ty 2\cod2sp_s.exe” +set com_in­tro­played 1 This fixed the sin­gle-play­er for me, but I still could not open mul­ti­play­er.
4. I found on NT­com­pat­i­ble.com a seem­ing­ly-ridicu­lous lit­tle propo­si­tion. The poster sug­gest­ed that, to run CoD2 mul­ti­play­er, one should plug some­thing in to the mi­cro­phone jack. So, I did, and lo and be­hold, it worked! Rather a strange so­lu­tion, I do say. It like­ly has some­thing to do with the in­ter­ac­tion be­tween my in­te­grat­ed au­dio and the voice chat fea­tures of CoD2, so turn­ing off voice chat might al­low it to run with­out a mi­cro­phone plugged in.

Any­ways, that’s how I got this game to work on Vis­ta; hope it helps some­body else too!