Heute Abend um 23:40 Uhr läuft auf Arte der Pilot zur neuen Reihe der „Durch die Nacht mit…“-Macher. Bela B empfängt unterschiedlichste Leute in Hotels, heute äußerst passend mit George A. Romero, Erfinder des modernen Zombies. Hier eine erste Kritik beim Rolling Stone, hier die Facebook-Seite, Snip von Arte:

In der Reihe “Hotel Bela” besucht Bela B., Schlagzeuger der deutschen Band “Die Ärzte” und Schauspieler – und somit selbst oft on the road – ganz unterschiedliche Künstler in ihren vorübergehenden Domizilen. Und dann entscheidet Bela ganz spontan, was er machen möchte – seine Gastgeber müssen auf alles gefasst sein. In der ersten Folge der geplanten Reihe ist Bela B. zu Gast bei George Romero, dem Meister des Horrorgenres, der in Lissabon seinen neuen Film vorstellt.

Bela B. trifft in der ersten Folge seiner Reihe “Hotel Bela” auf einen Filmemacher, dem er selbst als Riesenfan begegnet. Der legendäre Horrormeister George Romero, Herr der Untoten und Zombies, stellt in Lissabon seinen aktuellen Film vor. Bela fühlt dem Vater aller Zombieschocker (“Die Nacht der lebenden Toten”, “Zombie”) auf den Zahn.

Kann Romero seine Zombies von denen in anderen Filmen unterscheiden? Erkennt er seine eigenen Äußerungen oder geht er den Zitaten von Regiekollegen auf den Leim? Kann er aus seinem Hotelzimmer ein Filmset für eine Horrorszene machen? Und wie vertreibt sich der Filmveteran die Zeit in seiner Unterkunft? Warum hat er immer zwei Gummi-Enten dabei?

Bela B. testet mit George Romero den Zimmerservice, prüft die Minibar, untersucht das Bad und erklärt die Kaffeemaschine. Schon bald begreift Filmemacher George Romero, dass er sich auf mehr als nur ein Interview eingelassen hat – er hat als Erster eingecheckt im “Hotel Bela”.

Jim Rossignol is a games journalist, author and games producer.  He’s kindly provided me with notes from his next book.

We Are The Escapists

Could there be a connection between what motivates us see a movie or play Tetris on a train, and the what caused evolution of humans from wandering tribes to civilised city-dwellers? Could the impulse that drove our ancestors to create shelter from the raw materials of the world around them be the same impulse that causes you to want to read a novel or follow a TV series? I think there is a connection, and it is found in an under-identified human fundamental: escapism.

The word "escapism" is usually used to in the sense of "temporary mental diversion"; a flight of fancy – such as time with a romantic novel or an action movie. But it can, if we can be flexible about such things, be given a far wider application as one of the motive concepts of human existence. The human being is, as the geographer-philosopher Yi-Fu Tuan writes in his book on the subject, "an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is." We are all escapists, and, Tuan argues, we have been so since the beginning of human culture. Everything that we call history could be seen as the story of escapism. What has motivated us, throughout our epoch, is an inclination to escape the situation we find ourselves in. We have done so by creating tools. All animals change the world around them, of course, but only humans do so via technology, and thanks to imagination.

Culture is the product of imagination. Whatever we do or make, beyond the instinctual and the routine, is preceded by by the kernel of of an idea or image. Imagination is our unique way of escaping. Escaping to what and where? To something called "good" – a better life and better place.

[Yi-Fu Tuan, Escapism, p 113, 1998.]

What Tuan suggests is that we change the world around us because we are able to imagine things as they are not, as they could be, or even as they may never be. "Seeing what is not there lies at the foundation of all human culture," claims Tuan. He argues that our technology, even at its most basic, is about lifting us up out of animality. "An animal eats, has sexual drives, and sooner or later dies," writes Tuan. "I? Well, I dine, love, and aspire to be immortal. Culture is the totality of means by which I escape from my animal state of being."

Farming, then, is an escape from the harsh nomadic existence of the hunter-gatherer. Cooking is an escape from the ugly acts of evisceration of animals, and the unpleasant nature of many individual ingredients. Electricity – a basic fact of life for modern humans – is an escape from the cold, dark, silent nights in which our ancestors shivered. By this token, buildings are tools for escaping from the natural environment. Perhaps we once saw that branches and fronds from nearby vegetation could extend the cover provided by a cave, and this then evolved into increasingly sophisticated technologies of shelter and defence against the outside world. Later we chose to escape again, using art and story to allow us to step outside of the hovels and palaces we had built for ourselves, and into the strange fictive space beyond.

We’ve always been escaping, in one way or another. In Tuan’s picture our entire civilisation is a kind of escape. Migration across continents was an escape from our natural origins. Building homes and railways and cities were acts of escape, too – escape from the hardships environment, travel, or social existence. In the modern world our acts of escape might be quite different. Holidays in the countryside are often an escape from the city and back to "nature", while holidays in the city might be escape from the isolation and boredom of rural life. Escapism can be found in almost anything that removes us from the situation we find ourselves in: a visit to a gallery, a walk in a forest, a boozy night in a club. We have built endless structures to escape: environmentally, geographically, socially, and intellectually.

All this has come about because we have imagination at our disposal. Our imagination, one that is able to construct tools for dealing with predicaments we encounter in the world, seems unique in nature, although it arguably only a step beyond what is available to so many other creatures. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argues that the ability to imagine has evolved out of necessity for animals, who were required to model their surroundings, mentally, in order to survive them.

Natural selection built in the capacity to simulate the world as it is because this was necessary in order to perceive the world. You cannot see that two-dimensional patterns of lines on two retinas amount to a single solid cube unless you simulate, in your brain, a model of the cube. Having built in the capacity to simulate models of things as they are, natural selection found that it was but a short step to simulate things as they are not quite yet—to simulate the future. This turned out to have valuable consequences, for it enabled animals to benefit from "experience," not trial-and-error experience in their own past or in the life and death experience of their ancestors, but vicarious experience in the safe interior of the skull. And once natural selection had built brains capable of simulating slight departures from reality into the imagined future, a further capacity automatically flowered. Now it was but another short step to the wilder reaches of imagination revealed in dreams and in art, an escape from mundane reality that has no obvious limits.

[ Richard Dawkins, "The Evolved Imagination: Animals as models of their world," In Natural History magazine, 104 (September 1995): 8-11, 22-23. ]

Our everyday life, of course – that "mundane reality" is chock full of limits. Limits that we can  escape from. Flick the switch of imagination: Boom.

The chances are that your imaginative life is a blend of all these things, to some degree: music, paintings, videogames, architecture, television, sculptures, dancing, drugs.  You might, like me, be an avid gamer and take every chance you get to plunge into math-wrapped worlds of electronic entertainment, or you might only have dabbled in games with your children, or when you were a child. The chances are, however, that you’ll definitely spend some time with movies, or reading. If you do nothing more than play a bit of Sudoku to relax, then, well, that would make you fairly unusual. For most people, modern life contains a tapestry of entertainments, from Harry Potter novels to augmented-reality internet mysteries. Even those of us who are monstrous workaholics -  pissing out our careers like magma from the craters of Iceland – are likely to unwind with music, or a disgusting zombie movie.

The scale of this kind of escapism is awesome (in the traditional sense of that word). In 2003, in the United States alone, there was a novel published roughly every hour. (So around 9,000 novels were made available to the escapist public per year.) That’s a figure that only includes books from recognised publishers, too, and not those released via print-on-demand or posted by their authors on the internet.

Working out roughly how many novels have been written and published throughout history is ludicrously difficult, and earned me a bunch of snooty emails from literature professors across Europe. But we do know that English readers in the 17th and 18th century saw between twenty and sixty fiction titles appear each year, a figure which had risen to 13,000 by 2001. In terms of distribution the figures are hazy, but in 2009 there were 75 million works of fiction sold in the United Kingdom alone. The best estimate for fiction across all languages is in the tens of millions of unique titles, and that can be derived from the catalogue of books intended for digitisation on Google. The list of books and periodicals intended for digitisation from Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, Michigan and New York Public Library run to some ten million items, and these libraries will hold only a fraction of the total number of English-language novels, thanks to the mass market of pulp mass-market paperbacks across the 20th century.

Even that vast total is likely to seem very small against current information-generation trends, because the digital era has caused an astonishing proliferation of all kinds of data. Information analysts IDC claim that the internet doubles in size every eighteen months. That means that something like 988 exabytes of additional data appeared on the net in the year prior to my typing these words. This is about eighteen million times the information in all the books ever written, which we can hazily estimate is about 55 terabytes of book. Although if you were to take into account all printed material ever, you’d hit about 200 petabytes of information, according to Wikipedia’s information charts. (But what of comics? How do you quantify the information of words and pictures combined?)

The poet Coleridge was – I think fallaciously – said to have been the last man in England to have read every book published. That feat might have been essentially impossible in the 18th century, but today it’s certain we’d need a networked regiment of stoned poets to keep up with the day-to-day output of publishing.

The number of motion pictures available for our escapist purposes seems a little easier to apply numbers to. The International Film Index, 1895-1990, lists 242,000 entries, while The University of Berkeley, CA, in a 2003 report neatly called How Much Information estimates 4,500 movies have been filmed each year since 1990. This brings the total to (an extremely conservative) 330,000 at the time of writing. That figure includes only full-length features, and not straight-to-TV or short films, of which where will be several hundred thousand more to be considered. Movies seem to average out at about one hundred minutes in length, which means you’d need about 23,000 days to watch the entire catalogue of movies back to back. Television, which has been produced ceaselessly across the world since the 1930s, probably represents several times that amount. The Berkeley report counts TV among the information stored on magnetic camcorder tapes, which it estimates at 300,000 Terabytes per year, although that figure is likely to have changed as more and more cameras have moved over to digital recording.

Speaking of digital entertainment, it’s worth considering that videogames are even more time-consuming than other media, since many are non-linear, and are meant to be replayed, or restarted when the player fails. The number of published games since the first home console in 1972 (the Magnavox Odyssey, which pre-dated Pong by a couple of years) is roughly 50,000, a figure which can be fairly easily verified thanks to the videogame archive project, MobyGames. The project lists the games across eighty-eight gaming platforms since the Odyssey, and continues to track their proliferation into the second decade of the 21st century. It’s worth noting that MobyGames only lists commercially published and generally distributed games across a limited number of platforms, and does not record the tens of thousands of freeware games distributed on various platforms since the 1980s.  Games on iOS are now listed at 32,438, while the browser games site NewGrounds claims over 40,000 individual games.

The amount of a gamer’s life spent with videogames might be comparable to that which the movie-buff spends watching cinema, or the bookworm spends with books, but there’s often some extra tier of commitment. Because there is a often a skill to it, a mastery, there’s a reason why gamers are seen as something like monomaniacs. Games, of all the escapisms, are arguably the most entrenched, and the mania they imbue in players means that the word "addiction" gets thrown around rather carelessly. That said, here’s a number that might come in handy when trying to get a handle on what gaming entertainment means for the way time is spent: The number of hours the average American boy spends playing video games between ages 8 and 18, according to a 2007 Harris Interactive study is 9,761. (That, as numerous games bloggers have observed, is also roughly the amount of time the author Malcolm Gladwell argues it might take to be a master at a particular activity. Although given that games can be quite different, it might be an irrelevant observation.)

[ http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NEWS/allnewsbydate.asp?NewsID=1196 ]

Now imagine the total amount of time pumped into escapism. To execute such a sum we’re looking at estimating the time sunk into all the comic book pages ever flicked, pages of a novel ever pored over, all the man hours spent in the seats of cinemas, or in front of TV screens. Then there are all the days and weeks behind gamepads, mice, and keyboards, and even the time spent with pencil and dice play Dungeons & Dragons, or more traditional boardgames. To put all this into perspective, Carnegie Mellon Assistant Professor Luis Von Ahn was able to calculate that the global amount of time spent on Microsoft Solitaire (the basic card game that comes with Windows) was nine billion human-hours per year. For a final flourish of comparative statistics, it’s worth considering that the Panama canal took just twenty million human hours to build. The true figure for the time spent in escapism across the past century is, therefore, an unimaginable amount of time and effort.

What this means is that we are, as a species, profoundly adrift in escapism. It is so ubiquitous that it has at times become invisible. We barely pause to consider watching a TV show as we sit in a bar or a hotel room, such is the background hum of another episode of another show we find moderately entertaining. So various are our escapes and entertainments that any single person would be hard-pressed to list the things that have distracted and diverted them across the years. The catalogue of our distractions would fill a library.

Nor are these examples genuinely capturing the full breadth of what escapism means. Escape now offers us some intriguing, even sinister, avenues. In an interview on the architecture website BLDGBLOG the photographer Richard Mosse commented that parts of the US-Mexico border were being policed by amateurs, from home, via webcam. People were logging in during their spare time and watching… nothing. "I’m intrigued by the idea of people logging into, and staring at, live webcam views of an unchanging landscape on their home computers," said Mosse. "What drives people to do this? I suppose it’s the same lure that draws people to Google Earth. These are both a pursuit of the real within—and through—simulacra, and you are apprehending the world as if it were a computer game. That is enormously empowering, because the tools at your disposal are extremely powerful. You can go virtually anywhere without putting yourself at risk."

The lack of risk is surely one of the great attractions of escapism, but it’s the personal projection into another space that’s most interesting here. The ease with which you are able to extend your experience into some other space is alluring, even magical. Sometimes the magic is black.
It might not even be a fictional or imaginary space, as Mosse points out, it could be very real, but simply distanced. This is just another example of escapism, this time with a practical application – policing. It is simply more evidence that Tuan was on to something, that he was right to argue that we are framed by our inclinations for escape. We want to step outside, even if just for a moment, and will do so with even the slightest provocation.

As with a crossword, or a detective fiction, or an Iron Man comic, the thrill in the webcam policing is in connecting with something outside of ourselves. Imagination is stimulated, exercised, by structuring itself against something external. Modelling the world and seeing how it could be. How it could be better, how it could be worse, how it could be controlled.

And our experience is broadened, because we no longer find ourselves so constrained. We escape.

Jim Rossignol is a co-founder of ROCK PAPER SHOTGUN, controller of games developer BIG ROBOT, and the author of THIS GAMING LIFE.  You can find him on Twitter.

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More for the beer crowd :)

It’s been almost 2 years since the Isaiah Mustafa appeared in the now world famous commercial for Old Spice. Since then, many spoofs have been made and probably this one won’t be the last. It’s for the movie “Puss in Boots” and shows Puss taking over the role of Isaiah..
I’m on a horse!



Company: Dreamworks
Agency: Unknown
Country: USA

Related posts:

1. Dreamworks: Interactive Youtube-takeover
2. Old Spice: Behind the Scenes
3. Old Spice: Isaiah VS Fabio

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Google Beer! Free with every android?

The IKEA Effect refers to the tendency for people to value things they have created/built themselves more than if made by someone else – in fact, nearly as much as if an expert had created the same item.  I recently came across a fascinating article by Norton, Mochon and Ariely^[1] in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (i.e. marketing) testing this.  Although not scientifically tested until this paper, the effect has been well known among product designers for some time, as the authors explain:

When instant cake mixes were introduced in the 1950s as part of a broader trend to simplify the life of the American housewife by minimizing manual labor, housewives were initially resistant: the mixes made cooking too easy, making their labor and skill seem undervalued. As a result, manufacturers changed the recipe to require adding an egg; while there are likely several reasons why this change led to greater subsequent adoption, infusing the task with labor appeared to be a crucial ingredient.

This suggests that by asking consumers to do a little legwork, you can increase their belief in the value of the product they have created, even if it would have been better constructed by professionals.  Perhaps the best-known application of this principle is the theory’s namesake, Swedish furniture manufacturer IKEA.  IKEA furniture is sold in boxes, with sometimes a great deal of assembly required.

I can attest personally to the power of the IKEA effect.  We actually purchased an entire kitchen from IKEA, which I assembled and installed myself.  And it is a hundred times better than anything professionals could have made!

As intuitively appealing as this theory is, it was left untested scientifically until this paper, in which Norton and colleagues manipulated several characteristics of the IKEA effect to explore the conditions under which it is most evident.  Here’s what they did:

• Experiment 1A: Participants either inspected an IKEA pre-built box or assembled it themselves.  Afterward, they were asked to bid on the box they had either seen or built.  If their bid was above a random number, they would pay that amount to keep the box; if it was lower, they couldn’t keep it.  Participants were also asked to self-report on the value of the box.  An effect was found in both cases; on average, participants bid 62% more when they built the box versus when they simply inspected it.  On average, participants also self-reported liking the self-built box more than the inspected boxes.
• Experiment 1B: A similar design as Experiment 1A was used, except replacing IKEA boxes with origami cranes and frogs.  There were no differences in value between the types of origami (cranes vs frogs), although participants bid 460% more for their own origami creations versus ones created by others, almost the market-driven value of cranes and frogs created by origami experts.  The authors also discovered that participants thought others would value their origami creations highly, despite assigning little value to the amateur creations of others.
• Experiment 2: Participants built small Lego sets (10 to 12 pieces) in pairs and were asked to bid on their own and their partners’ sets.  Participants were either given a built Lego set (prebuilt condition), asked to build a Lego set (build condition), or asked to build a Lego set and then take it apart (unbuild condition).  Participants universally applied more value to their own sets versus those of their partners.  Most interestingly, the unbuild condition only produced slightly higher values than the prebuilt condition, while the build condition produced much larger values.  Apparently, we placed increased value on assembled objects only if they are completed.  Sounds pretty Gestalt to me.
• Experiment 3: Participants were asked to built an IKEA box once again, but this time, a random half of participants were stopped halfway through construction.  As expected, incomplete items were not valued as highly as completed items – especially interesting since a successful bid would mean that the participant could finish building the item later.

One of the reasons that the authors used IKEA boxes and tiny Lego kits was to account for increased perceived value in customization.  For example, you are likely to value your furniture more if you did something to it to make it better for you personally.  In these experiments, no customization was possible, further supporting the idea that it is the act of assembling the items itself that drives this effect.

The authors note, and it is an important caveat, to remember that all of these effects were done with simple, straightforward items.  Would the IKEA effect hold in more complex situations?  Is this the reason that open source software proponents are so “enthusiastic” about their products while the general market resists them – because those proponents had a hand in developing them?  If I assigned a student to edit Wikipedia for the better, am I unknowingly increasing that student’s faith and value placed in Wikipedia?  All interesting questions for future research!

1. Norton, M., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2011). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love Journal of Consumer Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jcps.2011.08.002 [↩]

When scientists struggle with a problem for over a decade, few of them think, “I know! I’ll ask computer gamers to help.” That, however, is exactly what Firas Khatib from the University of Washington did. The result: he and his legion of gaming co-authors have cracked a longstanding problem in AIDS research that scientists have puzzled over for years. It took them three weeks.

Khatib’s recruits played Foldit, a programme that reframes fiendish scientific challenges as a competitive multiplayer computer game. It taps into the collective problem-solving skills of tens of thousands of people, most of whom have little or no background in science. Here’s what I wrote about Foldit last year:

The goal of the game is to work out the three-dimensional structures of different proteins. Proteins are feats of biological origami; they consist of long chains of amino acids that fold into very specific and complicated shapes. These shapes can reveal how proteins work, but solving them is fiendishly challenging. To do it, scientists typically need to grow crystals of purified protein before bouncing X-rays off them.

Foldit takes a different approach, using the collective efforts of causal gamers to do the hard work. And its best players can outperform software designed to do the same job. Best of all, you don’t need a PhD to play Foldit. Barely an eighth of the players work in science, and two-thirds of the top scorers have no biochemistry experience beyond high school. The controls are intuitive; tutorial levels introduce the game’s mechanics; colourful visuals provide hints; and the interface is explained in simple language. While protein scientists concern themselves with “rotating alpha-helices” and “fixing degrees of freedom”, Foldit players simply ‘tweak’, ‘freeze’, ‘wiggle’ and ‘shake’ their on-screen shapes.

Foldit’s success relies on the fact that it doesn’t shallowly flirt with interactivity – it’s a true game. Its creator Seth Cooper designed it to “attract the widest possible audience… and encourage prolonged engagement”. It’s competitive: players are scored based on the stability of the structures they end up with and a leader board shows how they rank against other gamers. There’s also a social side: gamers can chat on online forums, work in groups to solve puzzles and share solutions on a wiki. And just like real game development, everything was tuned according to feedback from the players. Tools were added and refined, the difficulty of the tutorials was tweaked to stop frustrated beginners from leaving, and puzzles were matched to the skills of the players.

There’s the thrill of contributing to genuine scientific research, but that motivates less than half of the community. The rest do it for the achievement, the social aspects and largely, because the game was fun and immersive.

Foldit’s origins lie within Rosetta, a piece of software designed to solve protein structures by simulating and testing thousands of different folds. Rosetta is an example of ‘ distributed computing’, where volunteers run the program on their home computers when they don’t need it. They effectively donate their computing power to speed up the laborious task of solving protein structures. But the volunteers wanted to use their biological computers – their brains – as well as their man-made ones. They suggested an interactive version of the programme and in May 2008, they got their wish with Foldit.

Last year, Cooper showed that Foldit’s gamers were better than the Rosetta programme at solving many protein structures. They used a wide range of strategies, they could pick the best places to begin, and they were better at long-term planning. Human intuition trumped mechanical number-crunching.

This year, Khatib wanted to see if the Foldit community could solve fresh problems. He entered the players into a twice-yearly contest called CASP (Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction), where structural biologists from all over the world compete to predict the structures of proteins that have almost been solved. They get the best predictions from Rosetta to begin with. Then, they’re on their own.

Khatib’s gamers, bearing names such as Foldit Contenders Group and Foldit Void Crushers Group, had varying degrees of success in the contest. In many of the categories, they did reasonably well but they couldn’t match the best groups. They weren’t as good at using the structures of similar proteins to tweak the ones they were working on. They could also head down dead ends if they started at the wrong place. In one case, their strategy of refining their starting structures to the best possible degree led to one of the “most spectacular successes” in the contest. But mostly, they focused too heavily on tweaking already imperfect solutions that other teams achieved better results by making large-scale changes.

Learning from that lesson, Khatib stepped in himself. He agitated the initial protein structures in many random ways, to create a wide variety of terrible answers that the gamers could then refine. In their attempts, they came up with the best-ranked answer to the most difficult challenge in the competition.

It was a success, and more would follow. After the competition, the players solved an even more important problem. They discovered the structure of a protein belonging to the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV), a close relative of HIV that causes AIDS in monkeys.

These viruses create many of their proteins in one big block. They need to be cut apart, and the viruses use a scissor enzyme –a protease – to do that. Many scientists are trying to find drugs that disable the proteases. If they don’t work, the virus is hobbled – it’s like a mechanic that cannot remove any of her tools from their box.

To disable M-PMV’s protease, we need to know exactly what it looks like. Like real scissors, the proteases come in two halves that need to lock together in order to work. If we knew where the halves joined together, we could create drugs that prevent them from uniting. But until now, scientists have only been able to discern the structure of the two halves together. They have spent more than ten years trying to solve structure of a single isolated half, without any success.

The Foldit players had no such problems. They came up with several answers, one of which was almost close to perfect. In a few days, Khatib had refined their solution to deduce the protein’s final structure, and he has already spotted features that could make attractive targets for new drugs.

“This is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem,” writes Khatib. “These results indi­cate the potential for integrating video games into the real-world scientific process: the ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”

Update: Stephen Curry, who works on protein structures, had this to say about the paper: “Credit where it’s due: this is certainly an innovative approach to the problem of determining crystal structures of proteins. And I do like the idea of ‘citizen science’. Although it’s probably questionable how much science the gamers are understanding, the involvement in this sort of research, even if it is just at the level of playing a game, is undoubtedly a good thing.”

Curry also points out that a structure for this protein was published in 2003 using a different method called nuclear magnetic resonance. Khatib says that this is “quite inaccurate” and that people have struggled to use it to progress any further, but Curry says that they don’t say much about the differences between the old and new structures.

Likewise, Khatib doesn’t mention how closely related the M-PMV protease and the HIV ones are. “This information is crucial for deciding whether a structure of M-PMV protease is going to be any use as a template for the design of novel classes of drug targeted to HIV protease. If I had reviewed this paper, I would have asked for that information to be included because it is needed to make sense of observed differences in structure,” he says.

Reference: Khatib,  DiMaio, Foldit Contenders Group, Foldit Void Crushers Group, Cooper, Kazmierczyk, Gilski, Krzywda, Zabranska,  Pichova, Thompson, Popović, Jaskolski & Baker. 2011. Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players. Nature Structural and Molecular Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nsmb.2119

More on Foldit: Foldit – tapping the wisdom of computer gamers to solve tough scientific puzzles

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Das was Sascha sagte ^^

(Youtube Direktadbusting, via Just)

Schönes Adbusting aus Dänemark für mehr Skateparks.

Three creative print advertisements made for Lego by TBWA Costa Rica. Instead of finding the words, spaceship, crocodile and tractor you have to find the piece of lego to create it.

Company: Lego
Agency: TBWA, Costa Rica
Country: Costa Rica

No related posts.

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Dear people who say that there is no place for science in games. Stick it. :-)

[In this feature, usability studio Vertical Slice measures player reactions to four Xbox 360 horror games to find out which game is the "scariest," how casual and core players react to the same games, and whether or not they are scared in the same way.]

This study was undertaken by usability and user experience studio Vertical Slice as an internal investigation. As this piece was not for commercial use, and used games that have already been released, it seeks to determine which Xbox 360 game is the "scariest," and is not intended to be a criticism or full analysis of the games in question.

Study Format

Using some of Vertical Slice's unique approaches to user research, the study used a number of methods including interview techniques, think-aloud, researcher/participant post-play analysis and biometric feedback in order to evaluate the player experiences with each game. A group of six players, selected from a comprehensive database of over 500 individuals, was asked to play four different games -- each for 30 minutes, or an otherwise similarly appropriate length of time, depending on the game's content.

The study was conducted in Vertical Slice's labs in Brighton, UK, which are designed to emulate natural gaming conditions. Players were invited to play exactly as they would at home, skipping cutscenes and selecting difficulties as they usually would. The sessions also took place late in the day, so that the room was darker and the play took place during a more familiar time of day for the gamers.

The order of games was counter-balanced across all players, as this helps reduce any bias that may have arisen from play order

Biometrics

The biometrics chosen for this study were heart rate, skin surface temperature, and GSR (Galvanic Skin Response). Respiration biometrics were also used for some of the participants. GSR is ideal for measuring arousal (excitement or frustration), skin temp is an indicator of valance (happiness or sadness) and fluctuations in the other two can highlight key moments of engagement. GSR is the top blue line in the graphs, and skin temperature is the middle green one.

Games Selected

Using social media tools, polls and small-scale informal investigation, a short list of the scariest Xbox 360 games was created. This list was whittled down to four candidates, which were then used for the final study. The selected games were Alan Wake, Resident Evil 5, Dead Space 2 and Condemned. Other games, such as Left 4 Dead 2, Gears of War 2, Condemned 2, FEAR 1 & 2, Dead Space 1, Silent Hill: Homecoming, Alone in the Dark and Mass Effect 2 were considered, but ultimately disregarded, for use in this research.

Players Selected

Six players were used, from a variety of gaming and demographic backgrounds. None of the participants have played any of the titles beforehand, and for the purposes of this study, they are broadly classified as either core or casual.

Kira Tanner - A 33 year old intermediate gamer, who spends at least five hours playing a week. She doesn't own an Xbox 360, though has a rich history of gaming experience. Claims to become very absorbed in games and scares easily. [core]

Rosalind Kemp - A 31 year old advanced player, who also spends at least five hours a week gaming. She owns all three major current consoles and insists she is not a casual gamer. [core]

Rob Pettman - A 34 year old novice gamer. Recently sold his Xbox 360 so currently does not spend any time playing gamers. [casual]

Mike McKernan - 42 year old casual player. Spends less than two hours a week gaming. Does have limited experience with games, and has for an extended period of time (since ZX81). Also owns a family Xbox 360, but rarely plays it himself. [casual]

Olivia Powell - A 20 year old casual gamer. She plays a lot of games, but seldom for long sessions. Owns no current consoles and professes to enjoy slower-paced or party games, finding action games quite stressful. [casual]

Matt Robinson - 29 year old hardcore gamer that plays his Xbox 360 over 20 hours a week. He is a fan of titles in the Fable and Fallout franchises. [core]

Alan Wake

Outline of Play

Alan Wake begins with a narrated nightmare experience that also serves as the game's tutorial. It starts with the player assuming control of the eponymous Alan Wake, who before long is pursued by a shadowy axe-man. Combat and light-wielding dynamics are introduced and the player must defeat a handful of enemies and navigate a horror-infused nightmare environment, before being chased by a massive black storm-like entity.

This opening sequence also features a cutscene (showing the non-explicit severing of another man's head) and includes some narrative framing and exposition. All players chose to play on the "normal" difficulty rating, except for one one (opting for "hard"). The play ended once the participants reached the lighthouse, thus ending the nightmare.

Analysis of Play

Confrontation. Players were largely unresponsive to the opening cinematic, but were generally vocally positive to the setting and introduction. The first significant beat is when Alan turns around to the deeply-voiced supernatural form of a man, who then threatens Alan vocally and then appears in front of him, before lunging at him with his axe. Five of the players died at this point, two of them multiple times, seemingly unaware that the correct course of action would have been to turn and flee.

This sudden change from the relative safety of the start to the panic of a supernatural conflict provoked a response from all of the players, with the casual players reacting more significantly. Players suggested this was neither a positive nor negative response, though the changes in biometric readings implied a sudden and sharp reaction. Four of the players stated that the scene came as a shock to them, with two agreeing that the moment was scary.

Rob was frightened as the axe-man approached, as a clear peak in his GSR reading confirms.

Perhaps surprisingly, the repeat appearances of the shadowy figure failed to provoke any significant response. Changes in respiration rate were attributed to tension arising from the initial combat, but relaxed into a more stable pattern. Only one player continued to react strongly until the mid-point was reached, a house within which Alan seeks safety from his pursuer.

Decapitation cinematic. It is at this stage when the cutscene depicting a non-graphic decapitation is played, which features intense horror scenes. Five of the players elicited a change in GSR at this stage, with multiple peaks each corresponding to different beats in the scene. However, post-analysis and speak-aloud connote that these peaks were the result of heightened engagement not relating to fear. Although one player (Olivia) said she did find this part scary, though another (Mike) said his response spike was the result of relief, meaning all the while the cutscene was playing (and the stranger getting mauled), he would be safe.

Here, Mike elicits a medium GSR response, but his temperature drops and breathing remains steady. He denies he was scared at this point, indicating that the response was related to something else, for example, relief or interest.

House scene. The following moment in the game sees the player trapped in a house, surrounded by dark spirits, eager to get in. This part saw a marked difference between the casual players and the core ones. The core gamers recognised this section as a period of scripted action, in which they knew through prior knowledge of gaming language that they would be safe. This was confirmed after talking with them, with Matt even offering "I knew I couldn't die at this bit, so I wasn't scared at all." When an illuminated exit appears, the three core players did not react.

In juxtaposition to this, two of the three casual players' biometrics indicated that this scene was very tense. The GSR and respiration metrics indicated stimulation, and the casual players all stated that they found this part to be scary. To reinforce this notion, a strong response was observed once the exit appeared, provoking both panic and relief in these casual players.

Despite the game's clear intention to scare during this scene, core player Matt fails to become stimulated and makes idle comments about the decor.

Final sequences. The second half of the demo features increased action, as players face larger numbers of enemies. Two players jumped when surprise attacked by enemies, both at unscripted moments. A third said, "very frightening... no ammunition, nasty axe murderer after me: that's frightening!" but registered sustained intense responses rather than sharp "surprise" peaks in biometrics.

The final minute sees players wander towards the lighthouse, but are interrupted by a black swirly mass. A chase scene ensues, in which two players died. This last minute provoked strong responses from most of the players, and was an incredibly tense, exhilarating finale. Skin temperature levels cooled as the game progressed, indicating a positive experience which was confirmed by five of the players.

Olivia, a player with generally mild GSR response compared to the other participants, demonstrates a marked increase in engagement for the climax of the level, accompanied by shrieking and admissions of fear.

Findings

There were four significant moments in the Alan Wake sessions. The initial confrontation provoked a scare response from all types of gamers, and was universally a scary moment. The horror cutscene was possibly designed to scare players, but responses were largely unrelated to fear. The following moment, which sees the players alone in the house, was interesting in that it scared only the casual players, with the core players unaffected. The final moment also managed, but perhaps to a lesser extent, to scare the casual players more than the experienced gamers.

This disparity in the player experience between core and casual gamers is illustrated by the post-session player experience diagrams. Most players, especially the casual players, enjoyed Alan Wake. It was a popular choice for the players when they were asked which title they wished to continue playing after the session had ended.

More player experience graphs displayed overleaf

Comparing the self-drawn player experiences for Alan Wake shows that casual players found the game more engaging than core players. The previously described key moments also illustrate that while core players were scared at times, the casual players found the experience generally quite scary throughout, and also enjoyed it more than the core gamers did.

RESIDENT EVIL 5

Outline of Play

Resident Evil 5 starts with a series of cutscenes, showing various acts of mild terror and providing exposition for its African backdrop. The play is very slow-paced, as the player is introduced to the controls and the setting. Before long, the protagonist Chris Redfield is confronted by a zombie, thrusting the player into the action. After this encounter, some fight/flight scenarios with further zombies are played out before a final showdown.

Another cinematic is shown, depicting in graphic detail the decapitation of one of Chris's acquaintances, followed by the ringleader's wild gestures in Chris's direction. An intense fight scene ensues, within which the player must defeat dozens of regular zombies and an axe-wielding superzombie. The play ended when players either completed this section (and thus the chapter) or when they died at a late stage in the chapter.

Analysis of Play

The slow opening of Resident Evil 5 meant that no significant events occurred until around the ten minute mark.

First contact. The primary contact with a zombie was the first major event for most players. This initial encounter made players modify their breathing and two players also showed a GSR response. The preceding cutscene was the cause of an initial peak, followed shortly after by another, when the player is left to fight the zombie.

Though it seemed that this scene may have been scary for players, particularly as it features some gory horror, none of the players agreed that they were scared at this point. The stimulation was deemed to be of a more excitatory nature, with players keen to engage in the upcoming action.

Response to this first zombie was mild, but Mike's gradually dwindling engagement was rekindled by this call to arms. His GSR rose slightly and his breathing became heavier, while his lowering temperature suggests he was enjoying playing the game: a sentiment he agreed with.

Mob encounter. The next key beat is when players face a large mob of zombies, prompting a flight-or-fight decision. GSR readings jumped for four players, and a shortness of breath/gasp was also observed. Only two players stated that this scenario was not scary at all, and no particular difference in reaction was noted between the core and casual gamers.

When players chose to shoot the zombies, a gradually decreasing level of engagement could be seen, while players that chose to flee the mob experienced a greater degree of emotion, with fear being the most common feeling. Some of the players said that this scene in general was at least mildly scary.

Kira chose to fight the oncoming horde of zombies. Her changing heart-rate and fluctuating GSR reading indicated she was engaged with the game much more than before this moment. However, she denied it was fear she was experiencing, and instead described this as anticipation of combat and the exhilaration of the combat itself.

Rally and beheading video. The main cutscene and precursor to the climax of the level is met around the 20 to 25 minute point. All of the players chose to watch this video in full, with three players demonstrating a reaction to the events unfolding, most specifically to the beheading. Players described the video as quite horrific, and perhaps a little scary, though Matt was keen to add "it's not really scary, more just alarming".

Here Rosalind's reaction to the beheading is the solitary response to the cutscene, which otherwise fails to provoke her very much. In this case, shock and gore manage to make the player feel fearful of the upcoming events, an anticipation-based fear that is independent of "scariness." We see another peak at the end of the video as play resumes.

Final shoot-out. The climax of the chapter saw players initially become very excited to be fighting against so many zombies. Most of the players stated that they were enjoying this scene, with casual players especially engaged with the action. There were no standout signature responses from the players, as each player approached the conflict with different tactics and skillsets. Even when struggling to survive, no player displayed any major biometric changes during this stage of the playthrough -- though sustained, minor stimulation could be observed.

Kira and Matt also noted that the flood of zombies actually detracted from any scariness they may have felt, and frustration at the size of the horde of undead, as well as difficulties in combating them, replaced any other emotions. Matt was alone in completing the level.

Although Matt is evidently regularly in peril and constantly attacked by the zombies, there were few moments where he was noticeably aroused, this bit being the most so. He even went so far as to say that parts of the finale were boring, due to the desensitization of the enemies.

Findings

Resident Evil 5 did not have many moments considered scary by the participants. Most players agreed that the game was enjoyable, and appreciated both the spectacle and the fun in the combat parts, yet denied they were "very scared" at any point.

• "This is weird. More weird than scary." - Matt
• "It's quite cool, but I'm not scared." - Kira

Despite limited amounts in the way of scariness through jumps or fear, Resident Evil did present a very atmospheric setting.

• "It's really quite atmospheric actually." - Rob
• "These dark tunnels are atmospheric; not really scary though." - Kira

The moments of gore also provoked a reaction in some of the players, particularly the casual gamers, which likely heightened the atmosphere and generated fear. This is a sentiment that was echoed by at least two of the players in post-play interviews. The game followed an upwardly-rising level of self-declared engagement amongst some of the players, with intensity high for the closing stages, though any scariness Resident Evil 5 managed to convey was during the middle sections, when the enemy was still an unknown.

Player Experience Graphs

When looking at the player experience graphs on the following page, it can be seen that for all players, they were stimulated by the first encounters with the zombies. This is largely an excitement response, but also moments of fear too. The casual players also responded to these moments in the same way as the core, but they continued to be engaged by the game by increasing amounts (though not necessarily scared), whereas the core players' engagement waned as the level progressed.

Dead Space 2

Outline of Play

Dead Space 2 begins with a calm but interrogative cutscene, in which it becomes clear that the protagonist from the first game, Isaac Clarke, is mentally ill. During the opening, the events soon turn to semi-hallucinatory horror, and soon Isaac finds himself woken by a medical orderly.

A grotesque attack upon the orderly means Isaac is forced to run through a necromorph-infested series of corridors, bound by a straightjacket. Isaac reaches the relative safety of another part of the hospital after beating a mini-QTE, and embarks on a quieter fact-finding role. Shortly, after a number of false alarms, other necromorphs attack Isaac.

The sessions ended at various stages depending on the player's abilities, but never earlier than the part where the telekinesis gun is found, and no players succeeded in reaching too far beyond the point at which the plasma gun is sourced from the device operating upon a screaming man.

Analysis of Play

Opening terror and start of gameplay. None of the players' interest was stimulated during the cutscene that played at the start, at least not until Isaac witnesses his dead wife become a necromorph in a horrific fashion.

At least four of the participants found this moment distressing, and were frightened further still when throttled by the orderly, only to have him gruesomely slaughtered by a grotesque creature.

It was suggested that these scenes were not only scary due to the abruptness and potency of the shocks, but were also heightened because of the liberal presentation of horror and gore. This was not universally agreed upon, but three of the players strongly agreed with this hypothesis, with another player agreeing to some extent.

Mike's breathing and GSR had returned to normal following the wife-horror of the intro video, but is again interrupted as the orderly is unexpectedly impaled from behind. An exclamation of "Oh wow!" and questioning confirmed that this moment was scary for him. He was not alone in this thought, as other players also experienced similar emotions at this point.

Straightjacket flee. The chase scene provided a number of scary moments for the players, arriving at different stages for each player. All but one of the players (Matt) died at least once before reaching the relative safety of the next room, with players especially struggling on a scripted mini-QTE sequence after being pounced upon by a necromorph. The points at which players were most engaged were at three definable but partially generative beats.

The first type of scare-inducing moment was whenever players were physically attacked by an enemy. This was most profound in the first instance of attack, but remained significant on each occurrence. The response was also elevated when players had little health remaining.

However, for one player (Matt), although his biometric reactions to necromorph attacks were in line with the other players, he did state "I couldn't really care less if I lived or died". This is either a case of participant denial of fear (for any number of reasons), or an alternative emotion felt by the player to what the other participants were feeling, though he was unable to remember what he was feeling at the time.

Olivia suffers her first direct attack from a necromorph. Clearly, her irregular GSR patterns are aligned with this moment, and she was shouting, "God, Oh my God, this shit is so scary!"

The second feature of the scene that regularly prompted a fear response was when players were knowingly pursued by enemies, but said aliens were not visible on-screen, and Isaac was just out of harm's way. This "implied danger" was a key cause of scariness for the participants, with Olivia suggesting, amongst screams, that knowing they were behind her was really scary.

The final cause of scariness in this opening chase was observed whenever players had trouble navigating. Four of the players took the wrong route, often resulting in death. Three of them said that this caused them to panic, making the chase even scarier. Kira, however, said that losing her way was frustrating and made the game less scary, which another player (Rob) found himself in agreement with, though only after he repeatedly had trouble with navigation.

This panic/frustration theme recurred when the mini-QTE part was reached, with initial fear soon dissipating into frustration as players took multiple attempts to survive it.

Rosalind died consecutively four times whilst struggling to navigate the dark corridors and locked doors of the asylum. Her shrieks of fear became cries of frustration as she failed to work out where to run to.

Non-combat horror scenes. After the panic of the first five minutes, players settled into the more somber pace of the following 10. The blood-splattered rooms and scenes of implied disgusting violence didn't elicit much response from the players, but there were a handful of shock-inducing moments that managed to scare every player, although, of course, to varying degrees.

The main sources of scares were when a screen abruptly blares on; when an apparently stationary patient suddenly grabs Isaac when he approaches; when the floor of a vent falls through; and a more subtle point when strange, alarming noises can be heard.

All of these managed to scare almost every player, with only Kira and Matt resisting, though even they were scared by at least one of these moments. Again, at all of these points, a dramatic change in GSR could be seen, and a modified respiration pattern could also be observed. Participants were particularly vocal during the scary parts of Dead Space 2, which helped with pinpointing specific emotions (fear) and they also remembered some of these individual scares in the post-session evaluation as being especially scary.

"I'm feeling very vulnerab -- woah!" Rob had already been scared by previous shocks in Dead Space 2, but the relative calmness of the game had heightened his expectations of fright. His suspicions that the game was about to throw another scare his way were confirmed when, mid-sentence, the floor fell through beneath him.

It is interesting that many of these scares were preceded by a period of unstable biometrics responses, such as an increased heart-rate and heavy or stunted breathing. This "anticipation" fear served as a key factor in building up the tension leading to the actual scares themselves, which was commented on by both Mike and Rosalind; an idea that other players also agreed with.

Telekinesis gun and combat. The final part that every player reached was when Isaac first receives the telekinesis gun. Some players couldn't work out how to progress, which made them frustrated, observed by both a peak in GSR and a gradual rising of skin temperature. Regardless, once they were confronted by a necromorph, those that worked out how to fight it using melee combat found it very scary.

Only Matt and Rosalind managed to use the telekinesis to impale the enemy, and were less scared as a result. Kira and Olivia were unable to figure out the combat controls, and claimed they were again more frustrated than scared after repeatedly dying.

Matt barely responds to the imminent threat of a sudden appearance of the necropmorph. He wanders around the room searching for an exit, and makes his way to the lift. Despite his relative nonchalance, his respiration is still irregular and it is possible that he is somewhat scared -- or at least engaged with the game -- at this point.

We can see from this that players that could comfortably dispatch enemies were barely frightened by the confrontation, and those that were entirely unable to fight back were too frustrated to be scared. The players that depended on melee combat to kill the necromorph(s) were the most scared by this part, perhaps as the chances of survival were low, but not impossible.

Speaking to players suggested that they felt a great deal of panic, but only the melee-using players (Rob and Olivia) said they felt scared. Once more, Matt remained nonplussed by the scenario, and actually decided to simply walk past the necromorph instead of engaging with it, not responding to the threat in any significant amount.

Findings

Dead Space 2 not only had numerous occasions in which players were universally frightened, but also revealed multiple types of fear response. The anticipation of a confrontation heightened the scariness in the game, and increased the potency of the scares when they followed periods of tension.

The use of sound and false-scares (whereby the shocks represented no threat to the player) generated short bursts of fear in the players. Despite this, for some of the times when genuine conflict occurred, players were actually less scared than they were for when they thought they were going to be engaging in combat.

• "Pretty spooky in here... Oooh... That was horrible!" - Mike upon seeing NPC slit throat
• "I can't take this, this is so scary!" - Olivia

Furthermore, the fast pacing of the game was coupled with scenes of graphic violence. These depictions of the grotesque were far scarier to players when they were presented at moments that were also scary in another respect (fight/flight, surprises), than when presented during a sequence in which the player is safe (cutscenes, NPC suicide). Gore is apparently only scary when it is featured alongside another scary element. Overall, Dead Space 2 managed to scare every player at least once, and also had moments of immediate fright (surprises), sustained anticipatory tension and fight/flight conflict-based fear.

Player Experience Graphs

The player-drawn graphs for Dead Space 2 were more animated than for any other game, with even the usually-disinterested Matt drawing a fairly wavy line showing his engagement with the game, including a number of peaks. Participants also easily managed to remember isolated incidents during which they were scared.

Condemned

Outline of Play

Condemned is the oldest of the games in the study, but it was agreed that it was renowned as a scary game, and is certainly still appropriate to examine. It opens with a criminal investigation, within which the player is given increasing degrees of control. The player finds out more about the context of the murder at hand, using various pieces of gadgetry and by listening to the other characters.

After 10 minutes of play, the player is left alone to investigate the dark, abandoned building to find the fleeing suspect. The player is attacked by a hooded man, under an implication of otherworldly influence. Long periods of navigation through the building follow, before further encounters with enemies occur.

Players generally stopped playing around the point at which they are handed an axe by another detective, but never before they have experienced the weapon-based melee combat.

Analysis of Play

Criminal investigation. The pacing of Condemned is the slowest of the games studied, and the opening 10 minutes feature no conflict whatsoever. Players got to grips with the investigative tools, but were not scared at this point.

The flash-back style cutscenes did evoke biometric reactions from at least three of the players, but Mike and Rosalind countered suggestions that they were scared with the notion that their intrigue was piqued, and had become eager to embark upon the game proper.

Mike's GSR peaked enormously during the flashback cutscene, but his regular, unchanged respiration rate backed his claim that he was merely intrigued, rather than scared: "It's all very nasty, but I don't feel any immediate peril"

First combat. Once the players were left alone to explore the building, they were almost immediately confronted by a surprise attack. This scared five of the players, as they were facing the wrong way at the time of attack. Matt dispatched the enemy in a single shot, and was lucky enough to be facing in the exact correct direction to witness the attack comfortably, so did not react strongly. The other players all elicited a strong biometric reaction to this surprise encounter. Two players (Mike and Olivia) yelped, and most of the participants said this was the scariest moment of the game.

Rob is engaged as the cues for the imminent encounter play out; the provocative noises and warning from the officer both make Rob tense as he prepares for the impending fight. He is attacked from behind and responds in an accordingly frightened fashion.

Exploration and rest of level. Every player struggled with navigation as they explored the building. This whole sequence had few standout moments, but different players had specific parts at which they found to be scary. Olivia jumped and shouted when she heard a loud moan, and Rosalind was shocked when she was attacked by another hooded enemy -- both backed by an observable biometric response.

There were also some players that found the flashback cutscenes to be scary, and others that found the scripted non-controlled attack upon the player very frightening. Nevertheless, there was no one standout moment that universally scared the majority of the players.

A great number of subtle responses were also noticed, with the noise of footsteps, the player's own shadow and hinted-at enemies all provoking mild responses in the participants. The adjectives used to describe this stage were "atmospheric", "spooky", "sinister", and "haunting", among others. After 10 minutes of this, fatigue set in, as players became frustrated at their lack of progress. None of the casual players reached the predetermined end point of the test, receiving the axe from the officer, and much of the tension experienced earlier on had faded by the end of the session.

Kira found navigation slightly frustrating, but remained absorbed in the atmosphere. Even 30 minutes in to the game, and over 10 minutes since any significant event, she was still responding to the game. She said that she found the atmosphere to be very tense, instilling a "medium" level of fear in her.

Findings

Interestingly, the core players were far less frustrated with the game than the casual ones. Indeed, the shocks and jumps were greater in core players, and they also retained their engagement with the game for a longer time than the less experienced participants. They were quicker to progress though the level, and also to absorb the exposition at the start. It is possible that the relative lack of scripted or obvious events confused the less experienced players, and the unpredictable nature of the game unnerved the core players.

Mike, Rob and Olivia (casuals) all said they found it to be confusing, especially in terms of navigation, and any scariness they felt at the start began to wane by the end. Conversely, both Matt and Rosalind said the game got scarier as it developed, with the tension in the building rising gradually as they progressed.

The core players were still engaged by the end of the session, and also demonstrated greater peaks and troughs, with the first encounter and later tension both proving memorable. The casual players were less engaged, and also less scared, but still found the first encounter particularly memorable

Conclusions

Actual combat is not as scary as the implied threat of combat. The biggest cares result from moments devoid of any physical combat; instances in which players anticipate or fear they are about to fight, but do not actually end up doing so.

Cutscenes are generally not sources of fear for most players, but casual players react more strongly to them. Core players seldom find cutscenes scary. Most players find cutscenes to be a respite from the game itself, though a minority of players is capable of being scared by some videos.

The first confrontation is almost always the scariest. In every game, across all player experience-levels, the first encounters with the enemies are much scarier than later ones.

Repeat failure prevents scenes from retaining any initial scariness they may have had before. Whenever players repeatedly die or spend too long struggling with navigation, frustration replaces fear. If major usability issues exist/occur, then players will be far less scared.

Gore in isolation can be provocative, but not scary. In some cases, the grotesque can make scenes scarier, providing there are other factors also contributing. Players are frightened even more when normal scares are accompanied by disgusting or shocking content. This gory material alone, however, fails to scare players.

Casual players are more easily scared than core players, but also enjoy the games more. Experienced gamers' familiarity with the medium, and their existing expectations of it, means they are less likely to become scared than casual gamers.

The closer a game resembles film, the more casual players are scared. Conversely, the less scripted a game is, the more the core players are scared. Third-person, tightly scripted events are scarier to casual players than to core gamers, while first-person, generative events are scarier to experienced players.

Heightened tension can be created by a potent atmosphere. This will keep the player engaged and ultimately make the scares bigger. Games which keep players engaged even when events are not occurring (by presenting a stimulating atmosphere) are more likely to scare players when those events do occur.

Large numbers of enemies makes games less scary. Once players are asked to dispatch more than two or three enemies at a time, they become less scared. Familiarity with enemies renders them less scary.

Scariest Game Rankings: "The scariest game on the Xbox 360"

Based on our observations and analysis, as well as direct questioning of the players themselves, the following order was determined:

Biometric Storyboards

(Where conflict between player experiences exist, core players were used for these storyboards rather than casual)

Conduction and analysis by: Joel Windels with Graham McAllister, Adam Smith, Gareth White and Pejman Mirza-Babaei

That beer you’re drinking from that cool independent brewery may not be what you think.  Another very cool data visualization from Philip H. Howard and Ginger Ogilvie at Michigan State University called Concentration in the US Beer Industry.  Similar to their last project visualizing the soft drink industry in The Illusion of Diversity, this new project shows the breweries and individual beers owned by the top 13 companies.

There is an appearance of great diversity in the number of brands and varieties of beer sold in the United States. The beer industry, however, is dominated by a relatively small number of firms.

AB InBev owns, co-owns or distributes more than 36 brands, for example, while MillerCoors controls at least 24 more. MillerCoors also brews Metropoulos & Company’s products under contract (thus the company that controls Pabst and 21 other brands is a “virtual” beer company).

Only meant to show which companies own which beer brands, the three bubble sizes are used to show parent companies, brewery brands and individual beer brands.  They designed a separate treemap visualization to show market share.

Because these are large visualizations, they have posted them within zooming viewers on the Michigan State University site.

Found on Flowing Data.

(Youtube Direktmissile, via Waxy)

Tolle Erfindung für alle Codingsklavenhalter: Eine Open Source-Lösung zur Steuerung eines Schaumstoffraketenwerfers, der den Coder abschießt, der die aktuell entwickelte Version kaputtcoded. Im Video sieht man „Tom take one in the back of the head all because of a missing semicolon!“ Code, Monkey! Code!

At a deeper level Retaliation is more than just a “simple python script”. It’s a radical rethink into how to manage software development teams and the software development lifecycle. It works on a deep psychological level to offer vast productivity improvements. The primal threat of mutually assured destruction lurking in every coder’s psyche ensures that even your sloppiest developers will never forget to check in that missing file again!

People who have already seen the movie American Psycho will surely recognize this copy. People who haven’t seen it should definitely do so. If you don’t have the time for it we present you the legendary scene on which this billboard is inspired.



Company: TV2
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, Auckland
Country: New Zealand

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Kaleidoscope - Uses their own software to compare the new licence agreement to the old one.

/screenshot - http://cl.ly/252r153E263v0R1E452y

/via David Torras

Die PARTEI hat in Berlin wieder zugeschlagen – diesmal die Forderung: Prenzlauer Berg! “Ein Atommüll-Endlager wird im Bezirk Prenzlauer Berg entstehen, Planungen und Stresstests wurden bereits von PARTEI-Experten durchgeführt. Deren einhellige Meinung: „Ein Endlager in Prenzlauer Berg ist sicher!“. Derzeit werden von der PARTEI mehrere verschiedene Konzepte geprüft. So stellen wir uns vor Castoren von den Betreibergesellschaften in der gebührenpflichtigen Parkzone zu lagern, oder sogenannte „Mini-Castoren“ für den hippen jungen Prenzlberger in Szeneläden zu verkaufen. Diese könnten dann je nach Befüllung als Tauchsieder oder Fußwärmer dienen.” Via

Vessel is an upcoming physics based platformer where you have to solve puzzles with several liquids.

Ein neues Card Game von Atlas, bei dem es das Ziel des Spielers ist, endlich den erlösenden Tod zu finden, während man die Mitspieler am nervigen Leben erhalten muss. Klingt nach ‘nem Game für mich.

From Dunwich to Innsmouth, from the halls of Miskatonic University to the Charles Dexter Ward at Arkham Sanitarium, trouble is in the air. The stars are almost right, and terrors from beyond space and time are beginning to break through. When Cthulhu rises, we’re all doomed — but whose downfall will be the most entertaining?

In Cthulhu Gloom, you control a group of Lovecraftian protagonists and guide them down a path of horror and madness to an untimely death, while keeping your opponents happy, healthy, and annoyingly alive. While your characters Gibber With Ghouls and Learn Loathsome Lore to earn negative points, you’ll encourage your opponents to be Analyzed by Alienists and to Just Forget About the Fungus to pile on positive points. When one group finally falls prey to the interdimensional doom that awaits us all, the player whose characters have suffered the most wins.

Cthulhu Gloom – A transparent card game from Atlas Games, mehr Bilder bei Boardgame Geek (via Lovecraftsman)

Psychologen haben den Effekt von Spoilern untersucht und haben herausgefunden, dass es für die Rezeption einer Story (oder eines Films) besser ist, das Ende vorher zu kennen. Ich schreibe es ja immer wieder: Mir gehen Spoiler ziemlich weit am meinem behaarten Saque vorbei, ich weiß aber auch, dass ich mit diesem Gedanken ziemlich alleine bin. Schön, dass mich die Wissenschaft bestätigt.

Es ist nämlich so: Eine Story/Geschichte ist nur ein Werkzeug, um gutes Storytelling zu bewerkstelligen und genau die Form des Storytellings nimmt man besser wahr, wenn man die Details der Geschichte im voraus kennt. Und, das ist zumindest meine eigene Erfahrung, das stimmt. Ich habe heute noch den gleichen, vielleicht sogar noch mehr Spaß an Filmen, die ich bereits kenne und das gilt ebenso für Twists wie in „Sixth Sense“ oder „Fight Club“. Freilich, der WTF-Effekt ist weg. Was bleibt sind mehr Zeit für Details, für Figurenzeichnungen und die Inszenierung und wenn ich ehrlich bin, ist mir das tausendmal lieber, als nicht zu wissen, dass Darth Vader Lukes Vater ist. Fuck yeah, Science!

Many of us go to extraordinary lengths to avoid learning the endings of stories we have yet to read or see – plugging our ears, for example, and loudly repeating “la-la-la-la,” when discussion threatens to reveal the outcome. Of book and movie critics, we demand they not give away any plot twists or, at least, oblige with a clearly labeled “spoiler alert.” We get angry with friends who slip up and spill a fictional secret.

But we’re wrong and wasting our time, suggests a new experimental study from the University of California, San Diego. People who flip to the last page of a book before starting it have the better intuition. Spoilers don’t spoil stories. Contrary to popular wisdom, they actually seem to enhance enjoyment. […]

Why? The answers go beyond the scope of the study, but one possibility is perhaps the simplest one: that plot is overrated. “Plots are just excuses for great writing. What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing,” said Christenfeld, a UC San Diego professor of social psychology.

“Monet’s paintings aren’t really about water lilies,” he said.

Spoiler Alert: Stories Are Not Spoiled by ‘Spoilers’ (via MeFi)

The IGF award-winning platformer Limbo has just been released on Steam for $9.99. It was also released on PSN a few weeks ago.

TIGdb: Entry for Limbo

Shared by mutaphysis
das ist wirklich ein saftiger Aufpreis. Hätte nicht gedacht das es so schlimm ist...

Zwei halbe Würste, die sich massiv unterscheiden. Finde den Unterschied !

Die eine habe ich in der Schweiz im Warenhaus Globus (eine 100%-Tochter der Migros) zu Fr. 5.60 gekauft. Umgerechnet  € 4.70. Die andere beim Feinkosthändler Hieber in Lörrach, Deutschland für € 1.69

Das ist nicht nur der doppelte, sondern beinahe der dreifache Preis, den ich in der Schweiz für ein und dasselbe Produkt zahlen muss.

Derweil überbieten sich unsere zwei Detailhandelsriesen allmonatlich gegenseitig mit läppischen Preisvergleichen unterschiedlicher Warenkörbe, klopfen sich in teuren, ganzseitigen Inseraten in der Tagespresse auf die Brust. Beanspruchen die alleinige Preisführerschaft in Sachen günstiger Preise. Ich werde den Verdacht nicht los, dass sich hier jemand in unverschämter Weise bereichert. Globus ? wir doch nicht, die Migros ? nein, niemals, wir sind die Billigsten der Schweiz. Der Importeur Neuenschwander in Grafenried ? nein. Wir bezahlen die Preise, die uns der deutsche Hersteller verlangt. Also sind die bösen Deutschen schuld ???
Der hiesige Konsument wird von Händlern und Importeuren richtiggehend für dumm verkauft. Unser Wirtschaftsminister, Johann Schneider-Amann empfiehlt derweil den Konsumenten, sich im Ausland einzudecken. Traurige Bankrotterklärung der Politik.

Die Schweizer Stiftung für Konsumentenschutz fordert Touristen auf, ihr krasse Verstösse zu melden. Mach ich.