Recently in the games section:

A great new technique for creating the illusion of 3D on a 2D display using current console technology has been developed for the Nintendo Wii by the famous Johnny Lee.

The technique uses the infrared sensors in the wii-mote to track the movement of your head (with the help of some infrared LEDs) and adjust the display in real time so that the perspective changes. This creates the illusion of seeing a truly 3D image without the headache inducing stereoscopic techniques used in 3D IMAX theatres.

You can see Johnny Lee demonstrating the technology in the video below. It's very impressive:

Thomas Miller at Sony also was impressed and ported the technique to the PlayStation 3 and has released the code for free to all PS3 developers:

I'm actually excited about these techniques because they require a minimum amount of fuss from a development and materials stand point, and produce very impressive results. I can't wait for a game that uses this!

See? Kids can learn valuable life skills from World of Warcraft:

In the article he describes how he first yelled at the moose, distracting it so his sister got away, then when he got attacked and the animal stood over him he feigned death. "Just like you learn at level 30 in World of Warcraft."

Now if only every hunter knew how to use their feign death key...

Via: Boing Boing.

I was recently browsing some World of Warcraft related sites when the inevitable gold farmer/seller site banner ad popped up, click to enlarge:

"Pofessional service" indeed.

Physical therapists prescribe Wii time

The title really says it all. It's not really news news, though, since it's been tried before.

The hospital has been using the Wii for about four months to help people recovering from strokes and spinal cord or traumatic brain injuries, according to Winget.

Therapists at Dodd Hall use the Wii's tennis, golf, bowling, baseball and boxing games -- which require patients to mimic real-world play while holding a motion-sensing controller -- for physical therapy. Patients also use the Web-connected console to find information on its news or weather channels to improve brain function.

They also note the fact that the Wii requires more kinesthetic interaction than other more conventional controller-based game systems. My favorite part of the article is the second half that is more specific about Perry, one of the patients who use the Wii.

His therapists said he is pushing hard on all of his exercises, but Perry said the video games are helping him go to the next level.

"This is more fun. It makes it more exciting. It gets me to work harder," said Perry, who has a fierce video game rivalry with his teenage nephew.

...

Perry said he has two goals -- getting home by Christmas and getting a Wii, supplies of which are tight for the second holiday season in a row.

"I wish I could find one," said Perry. "Anybody that's over who wants to play can play. If not, I'll be on that thing all by myself."

Today is National Dice Day, so make sure and roll some tetrahedrons and initiatives today!

Flickr user foglera has posted a gallery of his awesome 8-bit videogame inspired perler bead crafts. Want!

Via Ripten.

During the half-time of November 3's UC Berkeley vs. Washington State game, Berkeley's marching band performed an awesome video game themed show, including songs from Tetris, Mortal Kombat, Pokémon, The Legend of Zelda, and Super Mario Bros.:

I was part of marching band back in High School (Bb and Eb Clarinet), and if we would have ever had a video game themed half-time show, my geeky heart would have probably exploded with joy.

Via GayGamer.

Wil Wheaton (a wonderful writer and general geek, who got his start by playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: TNG) writes a funny entry in his blog on the superstitions all of us gamers have about our dice:

I stabbed the top of a Tofu pouch and drained its water into the sink. I dumped the tofu block out into my hand, and set it on the cutting board. While I sliced it in half, I said, "Anyway, in our second encounter, I had to roll a d20 for something, and while I was shaking it, it hopped out over the top of my hand, rolled across the table to my left, and came to rest against this other guy's stack of dice."

The pan warmed, and I dumped curry powder into the rapidly heating oil.

"It was like time stopped for a second, and the only thing any of us could see was my d20 resting against his d4 -- that's the one that looks like a pyramid."

"Oh, the one that's so fun to step on," she said.

"I said I was sorry about that," I said. I stirred the curry around, and put my tofu into the pan. It sizzled, and a delicious cloud of curry-flavored steam billowed into the kitchen.

"So while the other end of the table continued resolving their combat, he looked at me and said, very seriously, 'Uh, your dice are touching my dice.'"

In my local gaming group, there's one member who we have deemed as the "one-who-sucks-out-the-life-of-dice." We're all absolutely convinced that should he ever touch your dice, they will be cursed to never roll well for you again.

Sure, my intellectual side knows it's a gambler's fallacy, but that doesn't mean I'm going to risk his life sucking hands touching my dice!

The Daedelus Project, a site dedicated to researching the psychology of MMOs, posts some thoughts on superstitious behaviour in MMOs:

From beta all the way through months into launch players were CONVINCED that if you used the diplomacy skill on a chest it would improve the loot you got. This was SO widespread that you literally could not get in a pick up group without them querying about the diplomacy skills of the party and someone forcing everyone to wait while the highest diplomacy skill player cringed before the chest sufficiently. No matter how many times we posted on the forums that this was a myth and it doesn't do anything, they kept doing it. It got so bad our community relations manager even put it in his sig. Finally we made chests an invalid target for the diplomacy skill, then players whined that all the points they put into diplomacy were worthless because we "nerfed" the skill!

This is related to one of B.F. Skinner's behavioural conditioning studies in which he made pigeons behave in a superstitious manner:

B.F. Skinner is well-known for his theory of behavioral conditioning, but one of his quirkiest studies involved inducing superstition in pigeons (1948). 8 pigeons were placed in a reinforcement contraption (i.e., Skinner Box) and were given a food pellet every 15 seconds no matter what they did. After several days, each pigeon had fixated on a particular superstitious behavior. One pigeon danced counter-clockwise, another two developed a left-to-right head-swinging motion, another attacked an invisible object in the top right corner of the cage, and so forth. This phenomenon has also been replicated among high-school students (Bruner & Revuski, 1961). And given that MMOs are a kind of Skinner Box that offer some random rewards (e.g., rare drops), it's not surprising that superstitious behaviors emerge in MMOs as well.

I myself have experienced these first hand through many games, most recently in WoW and LOTRO. Some even become inside jokes among the sceptics like me (e.g. when someone brings up the belief that the loot table in an instance is determined by who makes and leads the group, we exclaim "Oh, and I hear Onyxia deep breaths more often too!" - a reference to the widely disproved theories that every patch caused the Onyxia encounter to change behaviours for the worse.)

This doesn't mean I'm immune to my own superstitions. For example, I deeply hold the belief that if we're doing well on a new boss encounter, and it looks like we're going to win, it is extremely important NOT to say "We've got this" or any variation thereof. Saying anything even remotely close to that will surely lead to a failed attempt. Granted, there are also psychological reasons for this (someone claiming victory before it is 100% assured can lead part of the group to relax, therefore paying less attention and dropping overall group performance), but in the end, it's just another superstition we all seem to fall victim to. Via kotaku.

Kotaku has a feature on the US Library of Congress's efforts to preserve video games as part of their collection:

The fact of the matter is, according to The Library of Congress, video games are just as important to our historical past as literature, movies and music. And at the moment, the LoC is teaming up with major universities across the country to begin a 2-year initiative with the sole intent of figuring out just how institutions can preserve video games for years to come, while making the content accessible for use and study.

So our story today doesn't present some artificial controversy ending in a sad, bleak future of debate and wasted efforts. Our story today is about the very real victory for game developers, enthusiasts and scholars, in which the top library in the nation has said they're part of this video game fad for the count.

There's some good analysis on the difficulties that arise when attempting to archive video games, from hardware preservation to copyright issues, much like the problems faced by The Library of Congress when the film archive first began.

Due to the fall in the value of the US Dollar against the Canadian Dollar, Sony has now lowered the price of all PS3 models and PlayStation Network downloads to match US pricing.

There's no mention of game pricing being lowered as well. Now we'll have to wait and see if Nintendo and Microsoft will follow suit.