Month: April 2016

I confidently asserted to my friends who make virtual reality games that:

With VR, you can’t see the other person having fun. You can’t see the person-having-fun and the fun-squirting-experience at the same time.

It will take a lot longer for people to believe the fun is there.

It will take a lot longer for people to see The Thing and say, “I gotta get me summa that!”

Will I ever be able to watch a Youtube and understand VR fun? See a video clip on the news? Watch over a guy’s shoulder at work?

So. Here’s how my friends confidently and effectively refuted my assertion.

https://youtu.be/qYfNzhLXYGc
Virtual Reality – SteamVR featuring the HTC Vive

 

And, in the course of the VR discussion [learned disputation on a BBS], the assertion ‘This will revolutionalize education’ was made, and confidently refuted. By youtube.

This Will Revolutionize Education

It is so convenient to have friends to set you straight.

More on the theme “Games in the NY Times”. Two interesting articles in the last two days.

When Dungeons & Dragons Set Off a ‘Moral Panic’

http://goo.gl/tb5IX1

The print article is of interest in itself, but of more interest is the 13 minute video piece at the top of the article. Called a ‘Retro Report’, “a series of video documentaries examining major news stories of the past and their reverberations.”

Interesting as a form of new video media embedded in old print media, and as an attempt to take retrospective looks at things that were ‘hot’ news in our ‘not-so-distant-pasts’.

For example… remember this?
http://www.retroreport.org/video/nuclear-winter/

 

… also, in the NY Times magazine, a feature on Minecraft.

THE MINECRAFT GENERATION: How a clunky Swedish computer game is teaching millions of children to master the digital world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html

Nice article. Wastes a lot of time trying to make the subject respectable by reference to the developmental virtues of playing with wooden blocks. But otherwise, ‘gets it’, and succeeds in presenting the essential delight of Minecraft in the lead.

I also give them props for making their own NY Times Minecraft world, and sharing it. And telling the reader…

To play, you’ll need a computer with Minecraft and a child who’s familiar with the game. Once you have those things, just log on to the nytmag.hypixel.net server (your child will know what this means).

FEATURED WORLD: New York Times Magazine & Christoph Niemann
https://goo.gl/U0zzGk