This video covers the basic history of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and related copy protection techniques. If you haven’t ventured into understanding this issue, this video is a good starting place!
February 12th, 2013 by Adam
The History of DRM on Games
February 12th, 2013 by Adam
Leaders of Hyperreal Civilizations
Hyperreality is the inability to decipher which is real and fake in the real world. The concept comes from Jean Baudrillard and he sees consumerism hampering our ability as a culture to see the real. I accidentally found one the best examples of hyperreality when I Googled the other day for Mansa Musa.
For some context, when you search a famous person on Google the site will pull in an image of that person like so:
Pretty nice feature right? Look at the image below of the search results for Mansa Musa:
You see that? Where Google usually puts an image of the person in question they have parsed the web and found that the best image to use is from the game Civilization IV!
I wondered if the other leaders from Civ IV and the newer Civ V (leaders) suffered from the same fate, and below are other leaders that get the hyperreal treatment:
Pachacuti (Incan):
Huayna Capac (also Incan):
Hammurabi (Babylon) gets a Civ 4 screenshot only in the thumbnail of his pictures:
All the other leaders are too popular or too well documented to have Google deem a screenshot from a video game is the best image. If I’ve missed any leaders please let me know!
January 12th, 2013 by Adam
A Tour of Old LA Via LA Noire for Someone who Lived There
A writer at EuroGamer had a neat idea for his father who doesn’t get video games which was to give his dad a tour of the city he grew up in. It’s a neat short story about how video games can recreate the past in an imperfect way, some things like landmarks were spot-on but the sound of some cars were off. You should read the tour of old Los Angeles in LA Noire.
I’ll never forget the moment we found it. Dad could just about remember the cross-streets – 6th and Flower – and I had a little trouble fiddling round in the game’s map to set a waypoint. Then we were off. On the drive, dad kept up a low-level muttering trail of recollections and fiercely specific critiques: the lamps on this bridge were right, but the large dumpsters in alleyways weren’t like anything he remembered seeing; a gas station’s Coke machine was just perfect, but little skirtings of exposed brickwork around the low walls of vacant lots ‘didn’t seem very Californian’; this was meant to be 1947? Why was that a 1950 Chevy, then? When we finally turned onto 6th, though, he suddenly stopped talking.
Like any son with a father in his late 60s, I assumed his sudden silence meant he was having a minor cardiac event. He wasn’t, however: he was simply back in the presence of a building he hadn’t seen in half a century.
Thanks to a certain ghost of a Flea.
October 23rd, 2012 by Adam
The Armageddon Letters
This month 50 years ago the world almost ended because of the Cuban missile crisis. The near-death experience for the entire human species was already been captured on film in the film Thirteen Days which was good for drama but was short on historical accuracy. The Armageddon Letters is centred around historical accuracy and it delivers it in a powerful way.
The website is a series of interactive and passive content that allows one to fully engage with the history of the crisis. It goes into great detail about the people and the decisions they made by providing films, books, graphic novels, podcasts, and even fictional blogs to flesh out what happened over those thirteen days. Jim Blight from the Basillie School believes that the Cuban missile crisis can teach us more than we previously thought about how close the world came to destruction because of a few men.
An iBook which accompanies the series from Brown University is also available on the App Store.
Found listening to the CBC’s Sunday Edition.
October 23rd, 2012 by Adam
The Last 35 Years of Console Prices
Nintendo recently announced the realease date and the price of their new console the Wii U (Nov. 18, $300) which puts them as the first release in the next generation of console. Still no word from Sony and Microsoft.
Gamasutra ran an article that examined the price point of the new console to see how it stacked up to previous console releases. Remember the Wii sold for $250 when it came out in 2006. From that article comes this great graph:
September 21st, 2012 by Adam
