Weekly 5 – 2/22/13
Hey friends, welcome to Weekly 5 The Weekly Gear Rising: Weekengeance Edition!
1. Hacking A Bug Fix on Starcraft
Here’s a great story from developer Patrick Wyatt about how the team hacked a solution together for a show-stopping path-finding bug during the final stages of development for Starcraft. It’s a nice reminder that game development is not really a science!
President Obama apparently uses Google+ and Google Hangouts, which makes him the only one that I know of. In this “Fireside Hangout” he briefly mentions videogames positively, saying they can be a positive influence in driving technology education. He also weighed in on IP and patent reform.
This is a great piece by Jane Robb looking at geology of Skyrim. Jane looks at the map and incorporates information about the kind of materials found in the game to develop the project.
To understand the geology of Skyrim, it’s not enough to just look at the rocks, or simply observe the landscape. What you need is an understanding of the interactions between rock types and their spatial and geographical distributions, i.e. where they are located on the map and what that looks like.
There was GOBS of snark on my twitter feed Wednesday night, mostly talking about Sony’s big Playstation 4 event. Many people watched the stream live (which in and of itself is pretty interesting), but there are some questions that still remain about the new console. Forbes has a nice writeup about what we didn’t learn about Sony’s new machine.
Well it’s not specific to videogames, though Jordan was the focus of NBA 2K11, but the second greatest NBA basketball player ever (Bill Russell will always be the greatest in my mind) turned fifty years old on the 17th, and so for you hoops fans out there it was a week of nostalgia for 90’s hoops. I really like this bit on Grantland where Magic Johnson tells the story of how Jordan informed him and Celtic great Larry Bird about the changing of the guard.
Abe Stein is a Research Affiliate at the MIT Game Lab and recently completed his SM in the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, writing about sports videogames. He has authored a number of articles about sports and sports media and is co-editor of the book Sports Videogames. He currently works as an Associate Director of Communications at Wheaton College, in Norton, MA and as a researcher with the eSports company Azubu, and have studied and written about sports media.