#StarWars - seen anew
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XYZZY - explained
Remember " twisty maze of passages, all alike "? From Rick Adams we have the origins of XYZZY, i.e., it was a mathematical in-joke. To quote But Ron Hunsinger believes there is a more meaningful origin to the 'XYZZY' word: "[XYZZY is] taught by math teachers the world around as a mnemonic device to remember how to do cross products. "When I first played Adventure, finding 'xyzzy' in it was like finding an old friend in an unlikely place. Or an inside joke." — Ron Hunsinger "'Cross products?' you ask. "Indeed. The cross product of two three-dimensional vectors is the vector whose length is the area of the parallelogram with the two given vectors as adjacent sides, and direction perpendicular to the plane of that parallelogram. "There is a 'simple' formula for the cross product. If A = B x C, where A, B, and C are the vectors (Ax, Ay, Az), (Bx, By, Bz), and (Cx, Cy, Cz), then: A x = B y C z ...
The Mechanics of Addiction masquerading as a Borderlands review.
Timeless Yegg-isms abound in this ode to The Mechanics of Addiction masquerading as a Borderlands review . Borderlands Gearbox somehow managed to make it gritty and ultimately appealing to the hardcore gaming crowd sending out their totally hardcore reviews from Mom's Basement Central ... in Diablo "co-op" meant "You log in and shout 'Hi Everybody!' and someone kills you instantly and takes every last goddamned shred of a possession you ever owned while mocking your ancestry. It's OK for the characters to be juvenile. It's OK for the target audience to be juvenile. But it's a fucking train wreck when the writers are juvenile , because they'll alienate everyone above their own level of sophistication -- a demographic that just so happens to have the most disposable income to spend on games it's missing many of the other elements people have come to expect of RPGs -- elements such as "the decisions I make affect the ...
BigData - Social Analytics
Another day, another BigData investment - this time with Kontagent getting a bunch-a money from Battery, Maverick, and Altos. The particular angle here is that Kontagent focuses on Social Analytics, in particular, gaming. Their secret sauce is in helping 'social gaming' folks figure out how to get their users more engrossed. I assume this is essentially BigData merged with a healthy dose of Behavioral Psychology (shades of Kahneman & Tversky ).