Nice to see some recognition of the 25th birthday of Tetris:
- Time Magazine: 25 Years of Tetris: From Russia With Fun
- Kotaku: Tetris Creator Wants To Turn Puzzler Into Sport
- Joystiq: Interview with Alexey Pajitnov
25 Years Of Tetris
June 14, 2009
No Comments » | 
games, video games | Tagged: Alexey Pajitnov, games, Tetris, This Is Your Brain On Tetris | 
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Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
This Is Your Brain On Tetris
April 25, 2009We’ve all seen the findings showing that Tetris has effects upon cerebral glucose metabolic rates (GMRs). Well, the game is back in the news with more brain research…
No Comments » | brain science, games, video games | Tagged: Alexey Pajitnov, brain, brain science, games, PTSD, Tetris, This Is Your Brain On Tetris, This Is Your Brain On Videogames | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Tracking Used Video Game Prices Over Time
April 21, 2009I wasn’t previously aware of VideoGamePriceCharts.com, but I learned about them recently through Kotaku. The site tracks the prices of used video games. Of particular interest is their recent article tracking prices of series games when a new installment is released.
The article shows historical data for series games such as Resident Evil, Pokemon and Call of Duty that shows spikes in prices for used copies of the older series installments surrounding the release of the newer installments. This is not entirely surprising, but I’ve never seen real data laid out to support the idea. They also have a posting from last year that shows the release of GTA IV causing a spike in prices for the earlier GTA games.
This has a few interesting implications:
No Comments » | games, video games | Tagged: capitalism, datamining, economics, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Portable Video Games
March 31, 2009No, I’m not talking about handheld games. I’m talking about games that get ported to a variety of hardware platforms.
Code portability is a topic of interest to me, and some video games allow an opportunity to study code that is ported across multiple hardware platforms and multiple operating systems. And sometimes, it is just a pleasure to see a good game move to another platform.
There are actually several categories here, so I’ll take a quick moment to sketch out how I divide them.
No Comments » | games, video games | Tagged: Alexey Pajitnov, Atari 2600, Dallas Gaming Mafia, Doom, emulation, first person shooter, FPS, id Software, portability, Quake, Tetris, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Datamining Everquest
March 28, 2009A group of academic researchers have obtained the complete server logs for the Everquest 2 MMORPG. It’s four years of data for over 400,000 players – the resulting dataset is nearly 60TB. That’s right, terabytes. Combined with some demographic surveys there is interesting datamining potential here.
This is also interesting because apparently the standard tools don’t quite scale to the task of analyzing this data:
Regardless of format, many one-pass, exhaustive algorithms simply choke on a dataset this large, which is forcing his group to use some incremental analysis methods or to work with subsets of the data.
Some items in the results that I found interesting:
No Comments » | datamining, games, video games | Tagged: Amazon.com, datamining, Everquest, MMORPG, Sony, World of Warcraft | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Havok’s AI Middleware
March 25, 2009I’ve been watching the multi-core video card space and looking at efforts to offload AI onto that hardware. In particular, I’m curious to see the shakeout of the various APIs. One candidate usage is, of course, video games.
No Comments » | AI, games, video games | Tagged: AI, pathfinding, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Wolfenstein 3D arrives on the iPhone
March 25, 2009id Software has released an iPhone port of Wolfenstein 3D. Released on the MS-DOS platform in 1992, the game has 16 years of history and has been ported to a variety of platforms in the years since.
No Comments » | games, video games | Tagged: CLIPS, Dallas Gaming Mafia, first person shooter, FPS, id Software, iPhone, open source, video game, Wolfenstein 3D | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Moving AI Onto GPUs
February 16, 2009And what do we have here? It seems that Nvidia and AMD are already on top of the idea of offloading AI onto GPUs.
6 Comments | AI, video games | Tagged: AI, AMD, Cuda, GPGPU, multicore, NVidia, parallelism, video games | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Game Developer Family Tree
February 16, 2009A site called Check Your HUD has put together a family tree of game developers. What I like most about this is the attempt to show the relationships between the companies including: mergers, splits, name changes, and companies formed by former members of another company.
No Comments » | games, infographics, video games | Tagged: family tree, graphics, graphs, infographics, video games, visualizations | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
Multicore Video Cards (Again)
February 16, 2009I’ve previously posted on the topics of CUDA and Larrabee. I continue to be intrigued by the possibilities that open up as multi-core GPU programming becomes available. For applications that need many threads this should present interesting opportunities. Why bother struggling to run your parallel application in the meager 4 or 8 cores of your CPU when you can offload the work to 32 cores?
No Comments » | AI, games, hardware, parallelism, rules, video games | Tagged: AMD, ATI, Cuda, Dallas Gaming Mafia, GPGPU, Intel, Larrabee, Microsoft, multicore, NVidia, OpenCL, parallel, parallelism, Quake | Permalink
Posted by Karl W. Reinsch
