Technophile Monkey

Recently, German state-run TV channel ZDF aired a consumer rights show that among other things included a report about violent games and children. ZDF claimed that the violence children see in games has a more profound effect on their own behavior than previously noticed, and that studies claiming the opposite are essentialy sponsored by EA Games and originate only at Cologne university. That’s a mouthful.

However, the report and the study were deeply flawed. Let me quote the program:

• Our study found that children who play indexed games show a 20% higher probability of developing violent tendencies in real life than the control group that did not play video games.

Now hold on a minute. Children playing indexed games? Why do you let them play indexed games, you idiots? In Germany, it is illegal to sell indexed games to minors! It is illegal to advertise indexed games! It is illegal to publish reviews of indexed games! These children should never have seen these games in the first place! I hope you can see I’m upset.

The “index” is run by the German media censorship board. There is a reason Germany does not allow the sales of such games to minors: They are not for children, they are 18+. If your kid is playing such a game, you are either doing something wrong or you know fairly well that your child is mature enough not to be influenced by it. Did the people who ran that study break the law when they made those games accessible to children? I don’t know German law well enough to make a good guess there.

People, especially incompetent journalists, still seem to believe that games are something for children. When will they realize that a video game is no different from a movie, that there are some that are suitable for children and some that are not? Why is the gaming market still not taken seriously enough?

Every single day at the office, I hear people complain about their operating system. Most of the time, these comments are aimed at Windows. I’m not biased at all when I say this, it’s a simple fact that I can prove empirically. People complain that the system gets unbearably slow after a while, that their hard drive space disappears even though they’re not using it for anything, that the machine does things they don’t want it to do and that they’re not sure whether it’s some sort of malware doing this or whether it’s a malfunction of the system itself.

Very small thought: If people aren’t happy with their operating system, why don’t they switch to a different one? Why do they just complain day in and day out instead? Human nature?

During my research about free (to play) online RPGs I’ve stumbled upon Daimonin. Daimonin continues where Crossfire left off. It’s a massively multiplayer roguelike, as opposed to a graphical MUD such as World of Warcraft or EverQuest. Hey, is EverQuest still relevant nowadays?

Just like Crossfire was used as a test tube for modern MMORPG features (almost every MMORPG out there owes a few features to Crossfire), Daimonin experiments with things too, and I hope some of the commercial MMOs will copy features from it. Contrasting with some other free MMOs, I’ve noticed that Daimonin feels like a finished game already, even though it’s still in beta. There are hundreds of dungeons, thousands of monsters, lots of items and they all have a certain degree of refinement that I’ve missed in other free MMO games. Also, balancing seems very good, though that’s probably too early to judge before I’ve seen the end game.

Give it a try. The controls are more geared towards hardcore gamers and certainly not easy to swallow for people who aren’t willing to make the effort, but once you know how things work, you understand why they work that way. An example: you can play nearly the entire game without ever taking your left hand off the left half of the keyboard, or your right hand off the keypad. Very streamlined and focused. Switching back and forth between mouse and keyboard isn’t necessary at all.

I could praise it some more, but I haven’t played enough for that, so you’d just call me a liar

Let me sound old for a few paragraphs. In the last twenty years, the raw processing power of graphics cards has increased tremendously. This has had a large effect mainly in the gaming sector. In the 80s, video games were pixely things. If you wanted to see something rendered in more than 32 colors, you had to visit an arcade, since that particular luxury was reserved for arcade machines costing several thousand Euros.

During the decade that followed, the games’ resolution and color palette increased, but games were still predominantly 2D. The first true 3D games appeared around 1992, again arcade-only. Sega’s Virtua Racing was one of the first racing games to use fully polygonal cars and characters. We thought we were in heaven! Smooth, silky movement. Like liquid chocolate! Or egg nog! We had dramatic camera angles, 60 frames per second… Mmmmmh!

Hit the link to find out why graphics don’t matter with some games, and which ones I mean.

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