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?
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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:
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Articlesfyhuang @ December 9, 2008 10:49 pm
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…
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Articlesfyhuang @ September 13, 2008 9:41 pm
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.
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Articlesfyhuang @ September 5, 2008 1:42 pm
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!