mySQLgame is a computer game played entirely with SQL queries:

Are you tired of browser-based games that are thinly veiled interfaces for databases? Finally, there’s a game that just is a database!

THRILL as you insert your very own row in the “rows” table!

With careful selection of SQL queries, you will soon have three or even four-digit numbers in some of the fields in your row! Other queries may allow you to use those numbers to subtract numbers from rows entered by other players — all while pushing the numbers in your own row even higher!

As you master the game, you may find that you have inserted not just one row into the game, but several!

- mySqlgame : Link.

Via Hack a Day, via Slashdot.

Over at Play This Thing!, game commentator the99th has published some highlights from the Games for Change 2008 Conference.

I find this bit particularly interesting:

I got to meet Paolo Pedercini, he’s working on a new game called Oilgarchy which is about peak oil, and might do another Monsanto* game. Soon, Monsanto* games will reign down in a saturation akin to terminator seeds or social network sites. He also told me something that is probably historic, but it hasn’t gone public yet.

- Patrick Dugan (the99th) @ Play This Thing!: Link.

* I’m pretty sure the99th really means McDonald’s, not Monsanto. No doubt the conference was hectic and the99th had a lot on his mind as he blogged his notes.
See McDonald’s Video Game.

Games for Change Conference 2008: Link.

Paolo Pedercini: Link

Peak Oil: Link.

“World of Goo is a physics based puzzle / construction game.”

Check out this nifty video:

World of Goo: Link.

Via Experimental Gameplay Project: Link.

Via Boing Boing: “Experimental Games being given away free with t-shirts at Target”: Link.

Free market economy? Level playing field? I don’t think so:

• The US Trade Representative makes trade concessions to the European Union, related to internet gambling.
• The deal is not subject to Congressional scrutiny or approval.
• A US Congressman requests that the USTR disclose the concessions.
• USTR rejects the request, “claiming the agreement was classified for national security reasons.”

Congressman Calls for U.S. Trade Representative to Provide Details of WTO Internet Gambling Settlement

Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) has requested the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) disclose trade concessions made to foreign trading partners without Congressional approval. DeFazio’s inquiry raises the possibility of Congressional intervention to void new market access commitments granted by USTR to the European Union and other complainants as compensation for a United States trade violation regarding Internet gambling.

In a letter circulated to all members of Congress last week, DeFazio encouraged his colleagues to join him in calling for the USTR to provide a copy of the concession agreement between the United States and the European Union. The USTR had recently rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for the same document, claiming the agreement was classified for national security reasons. “There is a concern that the USTR may have been ambitious in its use of a ‘national security’ classification to avoid any publicity of which new business sectors are to be subject to the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) treaty,” said DeFazio’s March 6 letter.

… The DeFazio request comes following a contentious trade dispute over Internet gambling, in which the Caribbean nation of Antigua successfully challenged the regulation of Internet gambling in the United States. The European Union announced earlier this week that it will open an investigation into a possible international trade violation by the US on this issue. The investigation is the result of a Trade Barriers Regulation complaint filed by the Remote Gambling Association (RGA), which represents the largest remote gambling companies in Europe. The RGA claims the US is in violation of international trade law by threatening and pursuing criminal prosecutions, forfeitures and other enforcement actions against foreign Internet gaming operators, while allowing domestic U.S. online gaming operators, primarily horse betting, to flourish.

- @ Eye on Gambling: Link.

Office of the United States Trade Representative @ Wikipedia: Link.

Ernest Gary Gygax (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008)

Saint Gygax of Dungeons & Dragons has passed from this world.

I was a D&D geek, back in my teens (late 70s, early 80s) ; and although I haven’t played in two decades, I’m still fond of the idea of D&D. I learned something about myself, and about other people, through Dungeons & Dragons. I learned that it’s okay to live a life rich in imagination.

Thank you, Gary Gygax: you did good. May your next adventures buckle as much swash; may your fireballs always do double damage; and may you always make your saving throws.

The New York Times reports:

Gary Gygax, a pioneer of the imagination who transported a fantasy realm of wizards, goblins and elves onto millions of kitchen tables around the world through the game he helped create, Dungeons & Dragons, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.

- By Seth Schiesel @ New York Times: March 5, 2008: Link.

“Gygax’s accomplishment makes him … like the person who first conceived staged drama, or the guy who came up with the idea for books.”
- Darren Zenko

Eulogizing E. Gary Gygax, “the Father of Dungeons & Dragons,” is a lot different than coming up with postmortem praise for, say, a great playwright or a titan of literature – Gygax’s accomplishment makes him more like the person who first conceived staged drama, or the guy who came up with the idea for books. Before D&D there was nothing like D&D; its advent created nerddom as we know it, and changed culture forever.

The antecedents of D&D were heroic fantasy literature on the one hand and tabletop war-gaming on the other. Both were proto-nerdy pursuits, and had been around for centuries by the time Gygax and collaborator Dave Arneson published their first set of role-playing rules in 1974. The singular genius of D&D was in bringing the two together, creating a statistical framework for simulating the fantastic worlds of Tolkien, Malory, and Robert E. Howard.

Overnight, fantasies of knights, wizards and rogues went from products you consumed (or maybe even created) in the privacy of your own head, to something you played – unique experiences generated with other people according to ground rules everybody (usually) agreed on: role-playing games were born.

- Darren Zenko @ The Star: Link.

Geek Love

In “Geek Love”, a touching and insightful obituary, Adam Rogers nicely summarizes my own experience with D&D:

Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.

For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.

Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not a paladin, and I know I don’t live in the Matrix. But the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order.

- Adam Rogers @ New York Times: Link.

Sam Potts created the charming, sly, geeky flowchart: Link to full image.

Via Boing Boing.

This looks interesting, although I haven’t yet wrapped my brain around it:

Your Task: Start at the Root of an n-dimensional Cube, and try to reach the opposite Side — the red Cube — within shortest Time.

- Link

“Thanks for the work you have done to help me better understand the inner workings of worldcraft, and the the utilities that could make my early, more budding career in level design more fruitful.”

I recently received this generous praise from D:

Dear Handy Vandal,

I just wanted to take the time to thank you for your efforts in what you have done, and what you have strived to do on the almanac. this is corny, but you have really really inspired me (since an early age, gosh!) in many ways to try to break into the game industry based on what you’ve shown.

(more…)

Love: a computer game environment by Eskil Steenberg

Boing Boing reports:

Eskil Steenberg is a solo game-developer who’s bent on creating an entire massively multiplayer online world single-handedly, using procedural generation techniques that cause the game to build itself by starting with clever rules and exploring them outwards. Based on the reports at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, it sounds like Steenberg’s really got something, and the screenshots are drop-dead knockout gorgeous.

- Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing: Link.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun describes Love as

… An exploration-based moderately-multiplayer FPS with astounding impressionistic visuals and a procedurally generated universe.

… So far [Steenberg] has already populated it with weird animals and wondrous, gaseous visuals, and he intends to build the world into a kind of communal adventure, where gamers work together to furnish a central village, defend it from enemy attack, and explore the surround world and its many dungeons. Players will be able to do things like deform elements of terrain, allowing them to build tunnel networks or walls to defend their property. Items will also be intended for the good of all as Steenberg creates them and drops them into the world. You won’t be picking up rifles in your adventures, but more likely the plans for the rifle-building machine, that can then be utilised by everyone in your village. Part Zelda, part Tale In The Desert, part adventure shooter, and wholly abstract and beautiful, Love looks the kind of amalgam of art, programming and internet savvy that we’ve desired without even being able to imagine.

- Jim Rossignol, Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Link.

Love.

“IBM is launching a new, free to play MMO called PowerUp that will challenge players to solve problems involving solar, wind, and hydropower before the environment of a fictional planet is destroyed by mounting crises.”
- Kotaku.com: Link.

More from Worlds in Motion:

The game features three missions for solar, water and wind power that must be solved, either by players alone or in groups, before various environmental crises destroy the planet. IBM says it developed the online world to support educators in engaging children on environmental issues, leveraging kids’ interest in virtual worlds and games. Interaction between players is restricted to phrase-based avatar chat, IBM says, to ensure safety.

IBM says it took 16 months to develop the online game, with advice from nearly 200 teens in the Connecticut Innovation Academy. IBM’s TryScience team from the New York Hall of Science worked with The Tech Museum in San Jose, California and the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota on the activities and game content.

The game will be accompanied by classroom lesson plans associated with the topics presented in the online experience, and will also include an interactive module to educate kids on 3D technologies used in virtual world building.

- Worlds in Motion: Link.

See powerupthegame.org.

Massassi Temple has an “It’s Not Lupus” thread with several amusing send-ups of House.

Above: Half-Life House, mashing up House with Gordon Freeman.
Link.

I designed a new logo today for the Handy Vandal’s Almanac:

For the uninitiated: I used to be the Handy Vandal, celebrated for my Almanac — a collection of tutorials and links for Half-Life developers.

The Almanac has been sitting dormant for several years. Today I went on a housecleaning binge — fixed some code bugs, culled some dead links, and so on. (If I’m going to leave the thing dormant, I at least want to leave it relatively tidy.) In the course of all that, I got inspired to create the new logo.

There’s an alternate version in the Half-Life 2 section.

Repurposed “Dangers of Alcoholism” comic from the 60s or 70s. Hilarious!

She: “Let me in there, I need to check my auctions! Just because I outbid you on that …”

He: “The way people like you sell things are ruining the server economy, all you do is farm!”

- Anonymous: link.

Via Boing Boing.

“You’re a gallery owner and you’re bidding on the works of up-and-coming artists, in the hopes of cornering the market on the Next Big Thing.”

It’s a game for 3-5 players … success in the game is almost entirely dependent on a strong bidding strategy. Modern Art is sometimes referred to as a boardgame, but the board itself is really just a method for scoring, as it is in the classic game Cribbage. In terms of actual gameplay, it’s a card game. Here’s how it works:

Each “gallery owner” receives 8-10 cards, depending on the number of players, and gets $100,000 in chips, to start things off. Each player also has a screen with the name of a city, used to hide his or her hand. Cities represented are London, Chicago, New York, Boston, Paris and Los Angeles …. Cards represent the name and individual work of one of one of the five fictitious artists up for auction: Yoko, Christin P. Karl Glitter, Krypto, and Lite Metal each have distinctive styles, and the works represented are impressively pretty for playing cards.

@ Play This Thing: link.

“A capsule toy that contains a self-assembly model of a capsule toy machine, complete with tiny capsule toys ready to vend.”

Japan is clearly a nation that worships shopping, a nation that has taken the retail experience to its bosom and raised in its honour a frenzy of poured concrete and burnished chrome, a hypermarket for saints. You can wander into a Japanese department store and lose an entire day, without even scraping the surface of the mall it’s embedded in. My personal nemesis is Yodabashi Camera: a department store that has a clothing and houseware department embedded in it where most such shops would feature an electronics boutique department. Half of the sixth floor of its Yokohama branch is given over to capsule toy vending machines, where for 200 yen (about 80 pence) you can turn the knob and acquire a tennis ball sized bundle of mysterious plasticky goodness with a model kit of some complexity within. My favourite … is a capsule toy that contains a self-assembly model of a capsule toy machine, complete with tiny capsule toys ready to vend. Even the toys teach recursion …

- Charles Stross: link.

Via Boing Boing.

“It’s neat, but how does the TV station know I turned this knob?”
- Pong early adopters

“It really was a world-changing event,” recalls Bushnell. “I can remember people saying, ‘It’s neat, but how does the TV station know I turned this knob?’ Their whole metric was TV signals came from TV stations. With Pong, it came from the game and that was a real epiphany. They didn’t understand how it was done. It was the staging for the personal-computer revolution to come.”

- Nolan Bushnell, inventor of Pong: link.

See also Pong @ Wikipedia.