Taking Apart The NES Version of Tetris

January 28, 2014

I just came across this article which digs through the actual code of the original NES version of Tetris and then creates an AI to play it.


Dreaming Tetris

September 12, 2013

Fascinating. Dr. Robert Stickgold found that amnesiacs will dream about Tetris (aka The Tetris Effect) even though they do not remember playing the game.


Playing Tetris Forever

August 2, 2013

Somehow I had previously overlooked this excellent page on methods for playing Tetris forever.


Move Notation System For Tetris

December 23, 2012

Chess has had standard notations for a long time. Isn’t it time that Tetris had one as well?


Pac-Man, How Does It Work?

December 8, 2010

Speaking of game AI…two Pac-Man-related links are making the blog rounds these days – one of them is new.

The new one is Chad Birch’s “Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior”. It is clear and well illustrated.

As Chad points out, he was inspired by and used Jamey Pittman’s “Pac-Man Dossier”. This is a nice resource.

It also seems that I haven’t previously blogged Don Hodges’ fix to a bug in the behavior of two of the ghosts. (The bug-fixing of classic videogames is a topic we will return to in the future.)

Of course, the ghosts need a Pac-Man to chase. I have previously linked to a Ms. Pac-Man computer player competition. Of specific interest is this paper on evolving rules to play Ms. Pac-Man (seems that I have not directly linked it before).

(Post title is of course a play on the “magnets…” meme.)


Detecting Poker Bots

December 7, 2010

The folks at the PokerStars online poker service actively police their games to make sure that bots are not being used to gain advantage.

Here’s a recent post from their Game Security staff demonstrating that they paid a visit to one player in order to witness the playing and playstyle in person.

It ends with the following wonderful quote:

We are pleased to report, however, that ‘rs03rs03’ is human.

(I also thought JWZ’s take on it was amusing. But you would need to have read Neuromancer to get it.)


Action Videogames Train Your Brain For Decision-Making

September 21, 2010

Researcher Daphne Bavelier is back with more videogame research. Once again, the study used The Sims 2, Call Of Duty 2, and Unreal Tournament.

The results of this study showed that those who played the action games made quicker decisions:

“In the problem-solving exercise, the action-game players made decisions 25 percent faster than the strategy group, while answering the same number of questions correctly.”


Games As A Killer App For AI

August 2, 2010

It has been ten years to the day since John E. Laird and Michael van Lent published their paper “Human-level AI’s Killer Application: Interactive Computer Games”. In ten years, what has and hasn’t changed?

(Direct link to PDF at Laird’s homepage)


The Future Of Gaming

March 17, 2010

Here’s the video for an interesting speech by Jesse Schell entitled “Design Outside The Box.”

Topics of the speech include:

  • the psychology of games – making them sticky
  • the consumer desire for realism and authenticity as a recent trend
  • technological convergence/divergence of devices, the iPhone, the iPad, and the “pocket exception”
  • the possibility of game achievements improving behavior
  • the fact that there are more FarmVille players on FaceBook than there are Twitter accounts

Achievements are already leaking over to non-games, some items that could have been mentioned:
Read the rest of this entry »


Revisiting Doom

March 16, 2010

A neat article by J.P. LeBreton looking back at the design and play style of the original Doom. As J.P. says:

Doom feels more like 1st person Robotron than a modern FPS