Play enough Civilization and you ponder why the AI places cities where it sometimes does. I’m pretty sure said AIs have never watched this video by Wendover Productions.
Now, if you’re wondering why cities exist in the first place, well, first off, lovers of both Civilization and SimCity will look at you sadly… or maybe longingly, knowing how many accumulated hours, month, and years you haven’t been playing Civilization and SimCity.
More importantly, however, you can watch this video by Wendover Productions.
Evidently, this month had gotten away from me –at least in term of blog updates– so this is most definitely old news, but remember how I noted that Netflix was getting into podcasts?
Well, apparently they’re getting into video games as well.
Shall we play a Netflix game? (Photo: the 1983 film WarGames)
I am not the biggest gamer nor the biggest technology maven, but even so, one sees news about how much more all content is being pushed online, how more companies are trying to have consumers access things by apps, and how controlling access –to the internet and apps– is key to many corporations making money.
They’re are longer reads, but I found them worthwhile to better understand Apple’s app store business model, how cloud gaming services mess with their collection of coin, and many of the potential paradigm shifts at play.
I hope this doesn’t become too frequent, but I had to post something about one of the recent victims of the pandemic. As is being reporting in multiple outlets, John Conway has died at the age of 82.
Photo credit Thane Plambeck/via the Ars Technica article linked.
I know Conway the same way so many people know him: from his game of Life. No, not the family board game with the impressive spinner in the middle of the 3-D board. Conway’s game was abstract and far more mathematical (but it still has spinners!). It was like an endless civilization-building simulation.
I first tried my hand at it using graph paper, but found this to be very manual, so I took to using a Pente board, not realizing Conway himself had used a Go board when he was coming up with the game from the 60s. Thankfully, far cleverer people than I ported it over to the Interwebs, where you can test much vaster combinations much faster than I ever could manually. My favorite is over at Bitstorm.
So, take a moment at some point and play around with it. It’s very absorbing.
(Note: not being a mathematician, I really can’t comment on what I understand are vast contributions in terms of other areas of mathematics, but I believe there are some links to that and some interviews in the Ars Technica article).
I’m not sure when I started using the W, A, S, and D keys playing first-person shooters on the computer, but I’m sure I wondered why that was the standard.
