Given that federated services always seem to coalesce around a provider that the bulk of people use, federation becomes a sort of implicit threat. Nobody really wants to run their own servers, but they know that it might be possible if their current host does something egregious enough to make it worth the effort.

Gavin McGruddy of MyAutoma has uploaded a great browser-based demo of the Cascadia Solo Mode, so that you can try it out for yourself

It’s difficult to say that the prosperity gospel itself led to Donald Trump’s inauguration. Again, only 17 percent of American Christians identify with it explicitly. It’s far more true, however, to say that the same cultural forces that led to the prosperity gospel’s proliferation in America — individualism, an affinity for ostentatious and charismatic leaders, the Protestant work ethic, and a cultural obsession with the power of “positive thinking” — shape how we, as a nation, approach politics.

game theory

Each player's portfolio will no doubt have overlaps with another player and navigating these conflicting and shared interests is half the fun!

From a game theoretic standpoint, we’ve already lost. Too many of our civil society adversaries have too much of our data, and we have so little of theirs.

In evolutionary terms, certainly, because the individuals that show these traits have a higher chance of survival in the long term.

This is it. I'm done with Page Translator, but you don't have to be. Fork the repo. Distribute the code yourself. This is now a cat-and-mouse game with Mozilla. Users will have to jump from one extension to another until language translation is a standard feature or the extension policy changes.

You might try this extension: https://github.com/andreicristianpetcu/google_translate_this It does the same thing in the same way as Page Translator and likely will be blocked by Mozilla, but this is a cat and mouse game worth playing if you rely on full-page in-line language translation.

This game comes with 12 sealed packages. Whoever loses in this ONE vs. MANY game gets to open one of the sealed packages. Inside will be new components, new abilities, and new rules that will help that side in future games

The European map has the same rules as the USA map, but the differences in geography create a different feel and strategy. There are fewer connections on the European map (70 lines for 39 countries vs 89 lines for 41 states). However, it is easier to get from one side of the map to the other on the Europe side. The max distance between any two countries is 6, vs a max distance of 10 on the USA map. So on Europe, it is easier to zigzag around the whole board, but harder to wiggle around in close quarters.

Interactions between Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) and human (players) are often included in the Mtb’s strategies to invade host responses, to replicate and persist within the host,

Losing face

games are low stakes, and they have an incredibly powerful and repeatable feedback mechanism. I don't know about you, but I hate to lose and love to win.

In a nutshell, the King's Keys deck started as an experiment to see what card games would be like if you rebuilt playing cards from the ground up. Instead of using ranks and suits, each card has a number (from one to four), one of four items, and one of four colors. The result is what I call a 4x4x4 deck where 64 playing cards each have a unique combination of these three parts.

Nash proved that if we allow mixed strategies, then every game with a finite number of players in which each player can choose from finitely many pure strategies has at least one Nash equilibrium.

Since games typically have perfect information, the outcome of the game is completely driven by the actions of the players.

we define the physiological and environmental parameters that mediate the transition from cooperation to competition

12 Tenets of Board Game Design for Stonemaier Games

No-limit

June 5, 2001 - Version 1.4 has been released!

While 100% of Irked's graphics were ripped from VEXED, Irked contains 90+% new code. Only the levels and the loop that evaluates blocks for removal were taken directly from VEXED.

Missandei, too, was failed. As one of the only two central people of colour in the entire series, her exit – her fridging, frankly – at the hands of a white woman was nothing short of woeful. She deserved so much more.

And that's not all. In 'The Last of the Starks' alone, the writers stuck two fingers up at Brienne after using her to service Jaime's internal struggle regarding his twisted devotion to Cersei. Then there was Sansa Stark's conversation with The Hound about the abuse she suffered at the hands of Ramsay Bolton, Littlefinger, and Joffrey, and the way in her suffering was, in the words of actor Jessica Chastain, used as "a tool to make a character stronger".

Following Rhaegal's death at the hands of Euron, Dany abandoned all reason to charge at him head on, endangering both herself and her last remaining dragon. Rather than attack from behind at speed, showering the fleet and their men in flames, she acted on impulse. Reason abandoned her.

That also does Jaime a disservice, implying that his love cannot possibly be as great and all-encompassing as Cersei's because she is their mother, and he is merely their father. He remains pragmatic, Cersei is deranged.

there has been one constant throughout: when women experience loss, they lose their minds.

The writing staff on Game of Thrones has always been male-dominated, with only four episodes in the show’s history being credited to female writers. Season eight is written and directed entirely by men (only one woman, Michelle MacLaren, has ever directed Thrones), although there has been at least one woman in the writer’s room, Gursimran Sandhu, this time around.

I forgave the show for its cruel treatment of Sansa a season ago, when it became clear that her story was one of survival rather than victimhood. But Thrones rarely passes up an opportunity to remind us of her rapes. It undermines a character who has refused to be beaten or defined by her suffering, especially when, in the latest episode, she credits her abuse for transforming her from a ‘little bird’ into what she is now. As Jessica Chastain pointed out on Twitter, it was Sansa and Sansa alone who transformed herself into the strong and savvy leader she is – not the men who abused and manipulated her. If the writers don’t understand that, how can we trust them to tell Sansa’s story properly?

To hear Tyrion and Varys – characters who have always been portrayed as egalitarian – say that Jon’s gender would make him a better leader than Daenerys is just depressing.

In its early years it might have lured in the typical male fantasy crowd with sex, violence and alpha-male characters like Ned and Robb Stark, Robert Baratheon and Jaime Lannister, but before you knew it a woman was on the Iron Throne, her main challenger was also a woman, and Westeros was stuffed full of female assassins, knights, wily politicos and Dame Diana Rigg.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the Pokémon Go-style smartphone game co-developed by Niantic and WB Games

Nimatron

The Binding of Edmund McMillen

I would argue that this mixture of play, game, and purpose was the characteristic product (if not always the avowed purpose) of the rhetorical, as against the philosophical, paideia.

Mobile Based User-Centered Learning Environment for Adult Absolute Illiterates

How to PlayWe don’t need to play every second of the day to enjoy play’s benefits. In his book, Brown calls play a catalyst. A little bit of play, he writes, can go a long way toward boosting our productivity and happiness. So how can you add play into your life? Here are a few tips from the experts:Change how you think about play. Remember that play is important for all aspects of our lives, including creativity and relationships. Give yourself permission to play every day. For instance, play can mean talking to your dog. “I[‘d] ask my dog Charlie, regularly, his opinion of the presidential candidates. He respond[ed] with a lifted ear and an upturning vocalization that goes ‘haruum?’” Eberle said.Play can be reading aloud to your partner, he said. “Some playful writers are made to be read aloud: Dylan Thomas, Art Buchwald, Carl Hiaasen, S.J. Perelman, Richard Feynman, Frank McCourt.”Take a play history. In his book Brown includes a primer to help readers reconnect with play. He suggests readers mine their past for play memories. What did you do as a child that excited you? Did you engage in those activities alone or with others? Or both? How can you recreate that today?Surround yourself with playful people. Both Brown and White stressed the importance of selecting friends who are playful – and of playing with your loved ones.Play with little ones. Playing with kids helps us experience the magic of play through their perspective. White and Brown both talked about playing around with their grandkids.Any time you think play is a waste, remember that it offers some serious benefits for both you and others. As Brown says in his book, “Play is the purest expression of love.”

Brown called play a “state of being,” “purposeless, fun and pleasurable.” For the most part, the focus is on the actual experience, not on accomplishing a goal, he said.

In some cases, though, great amounts of time playing video games (or doing any other single thing) can be evidence of something missing in a person's life. In some cases people engage in an activity not just because of their enjoyment of it, but also because it is an escape from something painful in their lives or is the only route available to them to satisfy basic psychological needs. This can occur for adults as well as children. The activity that seems to become obsessive might be video gaming, or it might be something else. For instance, some adults devote far more time to their careers than they otherwise might, because that allows them to avoid an unpleasant family environment. Some kids say they play video games at least partly as a means of escape, and some say they do so because it is the only realm of activity in which they feel free.[5] In an age in which children are often not allowed to play freely outdoors, and in which they are more or less constantly directed by adults, the virtual world of video games is for some the only realm where they are allowed to roam free and explore. If they were allowed more autonomy in the real world, many of them would spend less time at video games. As illustration of this idea, British gaming researcher Richard Wood gives some case examples.[6] One case is that of Martin, an 11-year-old boy whose mother became concerned about the huge amounts of time he was devoting to World of Warcraft and therefore forbade him from playing it or other video games, which made things only worse for Martin. It turned out, according to Wood, that Martin was an only child who was being bullied at school and hated going there, and who was afraid of going outside at home because of repeated bullying. The online video game was his only source of free expression and his only satisfying contact with other people. When this was taken away from him, he was understandably distraught. Another example is that of Helen, a 32-year-old MD who worked in a temporary research position and spent most of her spare time playing the MMORPG Final Fantasy alone in her apartment. It turned out that Helen had recently experienced a bad breakup with a long-term partner, was unhappy with her job, and was severely depressed. Playing Final Fantasy was not cause of her depression, but was her way of coping with it during this difficult time in her life. The online game provided social connections and pleasure at a time when nothing else did. In a study of more than 1300 adult video gamers (age 18 to 43), Andrew Przybylski and his colleagues at the University of Rochester found that a small percentage of them, who played many hours per day, described themselves as obsessively engaged--they felt that they didn't just "want" to play, but "needed" to play.[7] These players, when they stopped a session of playing, did not feel refreshed and energized as other players did, but felt tense and unhappy. The extensive questionnaires used in this study also revealed that these "obsessed" player were, in general, those whose basic psychological needs--their needs for freedom, competence, and social relationships--were not being met in real life. So, if your child or another loved one seems obsessed about video games and unhappy outside of the games, don't jump to the conclusion that the games are cause of the unhappiness. Instead, talk with your loved one and try to find out what might be missing or wrong in other aspects of his or her life and whether or not you can help to solve that problem.

To counteract the stereotype, Langlois points out that video gaming is hard fun, not easy fun. In his words: "This hard fun would not be possible if gamers were truly lazy or apathetic. And the level of detail that many gamers pay attention to is staggering, whether it be leveling a profession to 525 in WoW, unlocking every achievement in Halo 3, or mapping out every detail in the EVE universe. This is not apathy, this is meticulousness." So, Langlois helps gamers by helping them feel good about their gaming rather than bad about it. There is no reason why a dedicated video gamer should feel any worse about his or her hobby than a dedicated chess player or skier. Still, of course, some people let their dedication to video gaming--or to chess, or to skiing, or to anything else--interfere with other aspects of their life, and that can be a problem. Lots of us need to learn time management, especially as we reach adulthood, in order to do what we want to do and still fulfill our obligations to others. My loved ones sometimes remind me that it's not fair for me to spend all of my time reading and writing or going off alone bicycling or skiing. But, let's not stigmatize any of this by calling it an addiction. Let's just call it a time management problem and figure out constructive ways to deal with it.

Video-game designers have also mastered another trick to encourage more play: requiring an unpredictable number of actions in order to earn a reward. Giving one at regular intervals means that a player, having received a reward, will be less motivated to play on knowing that another is a long time coming. In Diablo, Dr Hilgard explains, a player may find a powerful weapon either after the very next monster that is slain, or not until a thousand monsters later. This schedule fosters more frequent engagement. Therefore the structure of reward patterns in different games may cause certain ones to be more addictive (particularly to gamers who are motivated by the prospect of completing goals and accumulating rare items).

Another risk factor is found in players with strong social motivation. Some games involve social obligations, where players have to work together. This can mean a player feels obliged to play along as the rest of the group wants to play. Farmville strives to ensure participation at regular intervals by making gamers dependent on each other for daily allotments of fantasy resources, says Joseph Hilgard, at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and colleagues in a recent paper in Frontiers in Psychology. Putting together role play and social use in one game should yield a highly compelling game. World of Warcraft, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game, fits this description and is, anecdotally, pretty addictive. 

Players are motivated by the extent to which different games fulfill their basic psychological needs; but some factors, more than others, are found in addiction. One risk factor is found in players who are trying to "escape" through fantasy immersion or role play. Indeed, their game use may be a symptom of some other underlying problem, say social phobia or depression. Playing can then generate a vicious cycle that is hard to treat if the game is a way of self-medicating. For example, a child who is unpopular in school, or being bullied, may be important and powerful in a video game. Real life may struggle to compete. 

Human psychology tells us that players should enjoy a game that satisfies the need for control, bestows a sense of one's progress, and fosters relationships with friends and others encountered. Yet gamers differ in their individual needs. Each person has their own "player personality" and this variation has spawned a vast industry designed to meet different motivations. Some may want to release aggression (Call of Duty), escape reality (World of Warcraft) or oversee building projects (Minecraft). Others are more motivated by in-game rewards, or have a high "loss aversion" and so find a challenging game unfair or frustrating (while others find it thrilling). A game like Flappy Birds, will most appeal to those who are attracted by repetitive actions, difficulty and have a low loss aversion. Those who have a high loss aversion, however, will find it infuriating. 

Yet, strategic games look for equilibrium in the formation and dissolution of ties in the context of the game theory advanced first by (Von Neumann et al. 2007), and later by (Nash 1950).

Perelman says his Babel Generator also proves how easy it is to game the system. While students are not going to walk into a standardized test with a Babel Generator in their back pocket, he says, they will quickly learn they can fool the algorithm by using lots of big words, complex sentences, and some key phrases - that make some English teachers cringe. "For example, you will get a higher score just by [writing] "in conclusion,'" he says.

Octavio Herrera also played baseball when he was Jake's age, and well remembers how it felt. "Nerves in your stomach, right?" he says. "Butterflies. I remember that as a kid, pitching in a game — 10 years old — so nervous and so scared." It may be uncomfortable at the time, he says, but "that's great to have in a situation where the stakes are really low — where, if you fail you're still going to get pizza and ice cream, and your parents are still going to tell you they love you." If kids can learn to fight their fear and work through it, he says, that steadiness comes in handy later in life — when the stakes are much higher. It's an ability Octavio says he relies on routinely, as a software entrepreneur who has created, bought and sold a number of companies.

And at the professional level, I want them to feel the ugly emotions that come with losing, but to also understand that losing a game truly isn’t the end of the world. We will work together to improve, and we will hopefully find a way to achieve success.

“Losing is only temporary and not all encompassing. You must simply study it, learn from it and try hard not to lose the same way again. Then you must have the self control to forget about it.”

Elizabeth clings precariously to her throne and her principles, protected by a small, dedicated group of resourceful spies and courageous secret agents.

The system should be tuned such that the fastest generally available computer would not be powerful enough to emulate the slowest computer that would be allowed to run the game. Depending on the pace of progress of computer technology and the lifespan of the game, it might eventually be necessary to change these requirements and force the users of the slowest computers to upgrade their hardware if they want to continue playing the game. While this would be frustrating for these players, I don't have a problem with it as long as there is a contract between the players and the game company that both agree to and are bound by - it would be part of the cost of playing without cheaters. Though I would hope that independent servers without these restrictions would also be available if there is demand for them.

Cheating is an issue in online games, and Blizzard is anticipating that cheaters may inevitably be an issue that they have to deal with in their upcoming team-based FPS, Overwatch. In a forum post written today, the developer talked about the penalties it’s imposing towards those who choose to cheat in the game.

the asteroid mining and the cultures that sprout up

Game Night

Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out.

Canadian Wildlife Service

Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions.

He has a very bad influence over all his friends, with the exception of myself.”

Dorian’s whims are laws to everybody, except himself.”

There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candor of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.22 No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him. He was made to be worshipped.

The ansible can instantly send information across any distance, defying both time and space. Spanner isn’t the ansible. It can’t shrink space. But it works because those engineers found a way to harness time

FRP library

If you make it so that future consequences exist in any of these various ways, it makes people more inclined to cooperate.

More specifically, Lcopold ( 1973) identified tlw ‘Citation Index game’ as onc of thc stratagems employcd by scientists to incrcasc thcir visibility among thcir pccrs. The ‘Game’ metaphor has usually been invoked to counter the ‘storybook’ idca of science as an idealised, dispassionate and selfless quest after truth and know- ledge, in which personal feelings and motivations are held in check by institutional imperatives.

Fuck You, I'm Stealing Home: A baseball themed band that toured the coast playing primarily basements and selling matchbooks with our name on them. The oddity of the theme alone helped move some serious units.

Aftermath: My first band when I was 12, named after the fourth Rolling Stones' (our biggest and practically only influence) album (Aftermath), and also because we rehearsed after math (well, school).

New York City Rhythm: Just straight up ripped off the title of a Barry Manilow song. At this point I was starting to become proud of the fact that I had no shame in admitting I liked what some might refer to as the more shameful side of AM Gold. 

There are alternative ways to implement a game loop in JavaFX. A slightly longer (but more flexible) approach involves the Timeline class, which is an animation sequence consisting of a set of KeyFrame objects. To create a game loop, the Timeline should be set to repeat indefinitely, and only a single KeyFrame is required, with its Duration set to 0.016 seconds (to attain 60 cycles per second). This implementation can be found in the Example3T.java file in the GitHub repo.

Wenzler and Cartier (1999) make an effective case for the use of games in organizational learning by asserting that “Games and simulations help organizations develop symbolic thinking and gestalt understanding; help them create memories of the future; enable shared experiences and the building of shared intelligence; and, possibly most important, develop their members' motivation and confidence to act,” (p. 375). A number of books and manuals (e.g., Pike & Busse, 1995; Stolovich & Keeps, 2002; Thiagarajan, 2003) advocate this kind of learner or trainee involvement

Cruickshank, D. R., & Telfer, R. (2001). Classroom games and simulations. Theory into Practice, 19(1), 75-80.

Games promote transfer because they require student participation and active involvement with the material within a rich context (Cruickshank & Telfer, 2001).

In the second part of the study, five faculty members were mentored to change traditional lectures to interactive games. A review of their perceptions of success and difficulty in using such activities in the college classroom, their students’ perceptions of the exercise, and student performance identified both benefits and costs. Suggestions are made for strategies to successfully implement games in the college classroom, based on consideration of these benefits and costs and the survey results.

unfamiliar game

Each class that derives from UObject has a singleton UClass created for it that contains all of the meta data about the class instance. UObject and UClass together are at the root of everything that a gameplay object does during its lifetime. The best way to think of the difference between a UClass and a UObject is that the UClass describes what an instance of a UObject will look like, what properties are available for serialization, networking, etc. Most gameplay development does not involve directly deriving from UObjects, but instead from AActor and UActorComponent. You do not need to know the details of how UClass/UObject works in order to write gameplay code, but it is good to know that these systems exist.

You submit the first grant, youpropose the novel thing. You know damn well any study section that’s evenmildly conservative is going give you, ‘‘Well, it sounds promising.’’ Theymight give you a good score, you hope for a good score, but it’s not going toget funded, because it’s too novel, it’s too risky, it’s too blah blah. But youalready have the damn data. You know on the second resubmit, you’re goingto say, ‘‘Good point! We took that to heart. Oh, what a wonderful suggestion!We will worry about this too. Guess what? Here’s the data!’’ Shove it downtheir throat. And then it’s funded. Because, wow, you flagged them, yousucker-punched them. They said, ‘‘This is really novel, blah, blah. Boy if youcould only do that, that would be a great grant.’’ Well, you alreadydiddo it,and that’s the point. And you basically sucker-punch the study section intogiving you the money by default. They have to at that point. They don’t havea choice.

Competition for funding, publications, scientific priority and overall career successleads scientists to describe their work in terms of strategies one might use in a game.Focus-group participants revealed that, like it or not, working within the scientificcommunity requires artful maneuvering and strategizing.

64hz-131072hz

systems analysis in this regard demands an ethnographic retooling,one in which ethnography might need to be conducted in government centers far from where theactual roads are constructed and might take into account politicians, technocrats, economists, en-gineers, and road builders, as well as road users themselves

In my research, we filmed an interaction between a couple and had each partner turn a rating dial as they watched their tape afterward. On this graph (at left), you can see how one couple rated their interaction. The blue dots represent the wife’s ratings over 15 minutes of conversation; the red dots represent the husband’s ratings. When you add them together, these ratings are a constant, which means that in this interaction, her gain is his loss and his gain is her loss. This is what’s called in game theory a “zero-sum game.” You’ve probably all heard of the concept. It’s the idea that in an interaction, there’s a winner and a loser. And by looking at ratings like this, I came to define a “betrayal metric”: It’s the extent to which an interaction is a zero-sum game, where your partner’s gain is your loss. On the other hand, by trust we really mean, mathematically, that our partner’s behavior is acting to increase our rating dial. Even though we’re disagreeing, my wife is thinking about my welfare, my best interests. When we scientifically tested these so-called trust and betrayal metrics, we found that a high trust metric is correlated with very positive outcomes, such as greater stability in the relationship. In a 20-year longitudinal study of couples in the San Francisco Bay Area that I recently completed with UC Berkeley psychologist Bob Levenson, we found that about 11 percent of couples had a zero-sum game pattern, like in that graph. Every six years, we would re-contact all of the couples in the study, and they would come back to Bob’s lab at Berkeley. Yet we noticed that many of the zero-sum couples weren’t coming back. I thought maybe they dropped out because they found the whole thing so unpleasant. Well, it turns out that they didn’t drop out. They died.

Interestingly, the investors’ expectations about the back-transfer from the trustee did not differ between the oxytocin and placebo recipients. Oxytocin increased the participants’ willingness to trust others, but it did not make them more optimistic about another person’s trustworthiness.

Conventional economic theory maintains that people will always behave in a purely self-interested manner. According to this worldview, it makes no sense to trust, whether in a trust game or in real life, as any trust will be exploited. The trustee will always keep her entire windfall for herself, so the investor would be better off not transferring any money in the first place. And yet when researchers like Joyce Berg and others have had people play the trust game with real monetary stakes, they have repeatedly found that the average investor will transfer half of her initial endowment and receive similar amounts in return. Through the trust game, researchers have also discovered a number of factors that seem to drive levels of trust. Familiarity breeds trust—players tend to trust each other more with each new game. So does introducing punishments for untrustworthy behavior, or even just reminding players of their obligations to each other.

In a first analysis, data showed that people who took less than 10 seconds to decide how much to give gave approximately 15 percent more to the common pool than people who took longer than 10 seconds.

There’s neuroscientifc studies thatshow that when people play games together and earn an award, there’s a greateractivation of their dopamine reward circuitry than when they earn that same awardon their own.

Reticulating Splines

We are using the term phygital as a way of emphasizing that these are a class of objects that have not simply had some digital functionality embedded within then but are connected devices whose functionality and operation is designed to exist simultaneously in both virtual and physical space.

this paper is speculating on a future in which creating game objects that link the physical and the digital presents an exciting and practical opportunity for game designers. However, such objects require interaction design approaches that not only utilise understandings from product design and graphical user interface but also how they might effectively be combined dynamically.

Example Game/Interaction Spaces for Game Objects used with Screens.

Dan Saffer suggests hidden affordances may actually be regarded as ‘discoverable’ (Saffer 2013) in recognition that designers may deliberately allow them to be revealed through accidental use or deliberate exploration. This is similar to the practice of game designers leaving hidden elements, or ‘easter eggs’, within their games that are discovered by accident, this practice hints at a possible interesting opportunity yet to be applied to game objects.

the interaction design of phygital objects for games requires games designers to not only fully understand the virtual aspects the affordances they are perhaps used to, but also to extend these to include the affordances we associate with physical objects to ensure their overall game design does not cause confusion for the player.

Interaction Design as defined by Verplank

mimetic interfaces

phygita

Internet of Things

games that use objects as physical game pieces to enhance the players’ interaction with virtual games.

More drastic are the changes to the returning Exp. Share item, which gives every inactive member of your party a half-portion of rewarded XP at the end of every battle, no questions asked.

"OUR POINT OF VIEW IS THAT GAMES ARE PART OF CULTURE, LIKE STUDYING MUSIC, CREATIVE WRITING OR FILM,"