Fascinating Links Roundup, December '10
Graphs and Charts
Effectiveness of depression treatments vs. popularity - This is a very interesting graph that reveals there are no crazy outliers, but a few big winners - exercise, sleep, and meditation all scored as well or better than any formal therapy - and one big loser, caffeine.
US Income by County - This graph is not terribly surprising, but it has a lot of very interesting data. It’s a good reality check for those of us who live in the Rich People Zone of the DC-Boston corridor. Interestingly, DC has the sharpest income drop-off of any major city: just a couple counties away is desperately poor West Virginia.
How to split up the US - An oldie but a goodie here, detailing the geographic friend relations of Americans on Facebook. This is an empirical graph of the cultural areas of the US: North, South, West, Texas, Seattle, SoCal, Salt Lake City.
What Happened in 1980? This is a nice little graph of health spending vs. GDP for major countries, presented in a very simple way. The title is misleading - the better question is “What happened in 1968?” - but it does reveal how these lines are not immutable laws of fate. American health spending has actually gone down at times, and shows an enormous difference between W’s first and second terms, for instance - but it also illustrates the magnitude of our problem nicely.
The Escapist Genre Wheel has its flaws, but it’s a very interesting way of describing the possible design space of video games that nobody else has thought of yet. I don’t need to explain much, except that I think “action” and “Strategy” are misnomers (as really, almost all games have plenty of action and strategy) and that they really refer to Direct / Indirect control over the world.
Video Games
Phyrexian Walker
One of the all-time ludonarrative dissonance winners. This card from Magic the Gathering has a menacing name, and a picture and quote that conjures up an enormous, diabolical spider machine straight out of H.G.Wells. But the text on the bottom of the card? 0 attack, 3 defense. This horror is as effective in-game as a Wall of Wood.
Keyword Play - Longtime readers will know I am a big fan of Magic head designer Mark Rosewater’s weekly column on game design, which is as far as I know a unique opportunity to peer inside the mind of a leading luminary on a regular basis. This is one of his best columns, and details a presentation he put together to solve one of the most glaring and insidious design problems with the game. I’ll give a brief explanation here.
Magic cards are divided up into five different colors, each of which has a different play style and is balanced against the others. Unfortunately, they had very unequal slices of the mechanical pie when it came to handing out common generic abilities called “keywords.” The blue cards all had keywords like “flying” that let them avoid combat, and the white cards all had keywords like “first strike” that helped them in combat, leading to a lot of boring games where your opponent’s cards didn’t matter to you. Mark takes about ten pages to reallocate the keywords to solve this problem, making sure not to break the world-building parts (green elephants trample, blue scholars don’t), in a very fair way.
Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza - Ostensibly, this is a video game review, but it transcends the form. It’s really an interview with gangster bosses about their lives, using the game as a way of asking questions. Genius.
Newer Facebook Games Are Attracting an Older Female Audience - This may be common folk knowledge, but it deserves to be repeated. Facebook games like FarmVille are enormous, and they are mostly played by adult women, not 18-year-old boys. Call of Duty makes a lot of noise because it retails for $60, but it has nothing on your virtual fish in terms of audience.
Salman Rushdie on Video Games and the Future of Storytelling - Rushdie is not a gamer himself, but he does have a bunch of prizes under his belt, and as such he has some penetrating insights from watching his son play Red Dead Redemption, which is likely to become Game of the Year primarily for its world-building. It’s only a six-minute video, so well worth watching.
Humor and Interesting Junk
Shamus Young’s satirical hardware review is instantly familiar to anyone who’s tried to shop for a computer. Shamus delivers a ruthless exposé of the madness of graphics card marketing. It’s only because the computer space is dominated by geeks that we put up with this nonsense at all. I’m always a fan of striking a blow for the end user, so bravo!
Do real men like to cuddle? - This one is pretty self-explanatory, and a really under-discussed subject. As a very pro-cuddles dude, I sympathize with our hero, trying vainly to suss out society’s attitude toward this behavior.
8 Ways Twilight is Better Than Real Life - There are a lot of webpages out there panning Twilight for its writing, characters, disturbing themes, etc. but this is a rare attempt to stand up for escapism in a very confusing world. The fantasy that boring, clumsy, unlikable Everywoman can have all her problems solved by The Perfect Man, from romance to friendship to career is not so worthy of ridicule as it appears.
Quotes from peer reviewers - This is a compilation of some of the best comments left by reviewers at the journal Environmental Microbiology. There are traces of genuine enthusiasm as well as hilarious put-downs like “This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author’s email ID so they can’t use the online system in future.”
The Daily WTF - This very geeky blog has a weekly feature dedicated to confusing and/or funny error messages in addition to its usual kvetching about code. This has some notable highlights, like one website which tells you to “Please enter your phone number with numeric letters.”
Effectiveness of depression treatments vs. popularity - This is a very interesting graph that reveals there are no crazy outliers, but a few big winners - exercise, sleep, and meditation all scored as well or better than any formal therapy - and one big loser, caffeine.
US Income by County - This graph is not terribly surprising, but it has a lot of very interesting data. It’s a good reality check for those of us who live in the Rich People Zone of the DC-Boston corridor. Interestingly, DC has the sharpest income drop-off of any major city: just a couple counties away is desperately poor West Virginia.
How to split up the US - An oldie but a goodie here, detailing the geographic friend relations of Americans on Facebook. This is an empirical graph of the cultural areas of the US: North, South, West, Texas, Seattle, SoCal, Salt Lake City.
What Happened in 1980? This is a nice little graph of health spending vs. GDP for major countries, presented in a very simple way. The title is misleading - the better question is “What happened in 1968?” - but it does reveal how these lines are not immutable laws of fate. American health spending has actually gone down at times, and shows an enormous difference between W’s first and second terms, for instance - but it also illustrates the magnitude of our problem nicely.
The Escapist Genre Wheel has its flaws, but it’s a very interesting way of describing the possible design space of video games that nobody else has thought of yet. I don’t need to explain much, except that I think “action” and “Strategy” are misnomers (as really, almost all games have plenty of action and strategy) and that they really refer to Direct / Indirect control over the world.
Video Games
Phyrexian Walker
One of the all-time ludonarrative dissonance winners. This card from Magic the Gathering has a menacing name, and a picture and quote that conjures up an enormous, diabolical spider machine straight out of H.G.Wells. But the text on the bottom of the card? 0 attack, 3 defense. This horror is as effective in-game as a Wall of Wood.
Keyword Play - Longtime readers will know I am a big fan of Magic head designer Mark Rosewater’s weekly column on game design, which is as far as I know a unique opportunity to peer inside the mind of a leading luminary on a regular basis. This is one of his best columns, and details a presentation he put together to solve one of the most glaring and insidious design problems with the game. I’ll give a brief explanation here.
Magic cards are divided up into five different colors, each of which has a different play style and is balanced against the others. Unfortunately, they had very unequal slices of the mechanical pie when it came to handing out common generic abilities called “keywords.” The blue cards all had keywords like “flying” that let them avoid combat, and the white cards all had keywords like “first strike” that helped them in combat, leading to a lot of boring games where your opponent’s cards didn’t matter to you. Mark takes about ten pages to reallocate the keywords to solve this problem, making sure not to break the world-building parts (green elephants trample, blue scholars don’t), in a very fair way.
Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza - Ostensibly, this is a video game review, but it transcends the form. It’s really an interview with gangster bosses about their lives, using the game as a way of asking questions. Genius.
Newer Facebook Games Are Attracting an Older Female Audience - This may be common folk knowledge, but it deserves to be repeated. Facebook games like FarmVille are enormous, and they are mostly played by adult women, not 18-year-old boys. Call of Duty makes a lot of noise because it retails for $60, but it has nothing on your virtual fish in terms of audience.
Salman Rushdie on Video Games and the Future of Storytelling - Rushdie is not a gamer himself, but he does have a bunch of prizes under his belt, and as such he has some penetrating insights from watching his son play Red Dead Redemption, which is likely to become Game of the Year primarily for its world-building. It’s only a six-minute video, so well worth watching.
Humor and Interesting Junk
Shamus Young’s satirical hardware review is instantly familiar to anyone who’s tried to shop for a computer. Shamus delivers a ruthless exposé of the madness of graphics card marketing. It’s only because the computer space is dominated by geeks that we put up with this nonsense at all. I’m always a fan of striking a blow for the end user, so bravo!
Do real men like to cuddle? - This one is pretty self-explanatory, and a really under-discussed subject. As a very pro-cuddles dude, I sympathize with our hero, trying vainly to suss out society’s attitude toward this behavior.
8 Ways Twilight is Better Than Real Life - There are a lot of webpages out there panning Twilight for its writing, characters, disturbing themes, etc. but this is a rare attempt to stand up for escapism in a very confusing world. The fantasy that boring, clumsy, unlikable Everywoman can have all her problems solved by The Perfect Man, from romance to friendship to career is not so worthy of ridicule as it appears.
Quotes from peer reviewers - This is a compilation of some of the best comments left by reviewers at the journal Environmental Microbiology. There are traces of genuine enthusiasm as well as hilarious put-downs like “This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author’s email ID so they can’t use the online system in future.”
The Daily WTF - This very geeky blog has a weekly feature dedicated to confusing and/or funny error messages in addition to its usual kvetching about code. This has some notable highlights, like one website which tells you to “Please enter your phone number with numeric letters.”