NASA-funded game aims to make science more appealing
Last week a curious, free release popped up on Steam: Moonbase Alpha, a NASA-funded game where up to six players can team up in order to save a near-future Lunar base crippled by a meteor strike. The game is just the first release from NASA's Learning Technologies program, which aims to help raise interest in the space program through gaming. Ars spoke with Daniel Laughlin, project manager of Learning Technologies, to learn more about the game and what we can expect to see in the future. The game was codeveloped by Army Game Studio and Virtual Heroes, two of the leading developers of "serious games." And according to Laughlin, NASA's decision to move into the game space was influenced a great deal by the success of the studios' previous releases. "The project was inspired in part by America's Army," Laughlin told Ars. Though development of the game didn't start until last year, Laughlin actually began researching the prospect of using games as an educational tool back in 2004.
Arrowhead Game Studios
Gauntlet: First screenshots Now at four days after the Gauntlet announcement we’re absolutely thrilled about the response we’ve received from fans as well as press. I won’t get long-winded this time but leave you with our very first released screenshots of our four heroes taking on a small horde of monsters, and a little sneak peek of an extra bad guy. We proudly bring back GAUNTLET! All the latest news heard about Arrowhead has been of our upcoming game Helldivers with Sony, but today we are thrilled to finally announce our other project together with Warner Bros. We give you GAUNTLET, our completely modernized take on the much loved classic arcade game originally made by Atari Games. Gauntlet will be completely remade but retaining many of its familiar features. We are so excited and proud to be able to revive and do our version of one of the games that inspired us to do Magicka. Also make sure to visit the Official Website Our new game: HELLDIVERS! View full post… View full post… Hello!
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Frogger is a good first game design activity for students with no programming background. Journey is designed to present several computational thinking patterns in an incremental fashion. Sokoban is a good second game design activity for students who have already completed the Frogger tutorials. PacMan is a good first game design activity for high school students with no programming background. More games: Space Invaders Sims-like games AgentCubes games (3D) coming soon! The Contagion simulation approximates how contagions are spread among humans who are in close proximity to one another. The Forest Fire simulation enables you to explore how forest fires unravel by letting you set fires to virtual forests with different parameters. More simulations: AgentSheets simulations AgentCubes simulations (3D) coming soon!
Gaming the System: Video Gamers Help Researchers Untangle Protein Folding Problem
What if the brainpower used playing video games could be channeled toward something more productive, such as helping scientists solve complex biological problems? A team of biochemists and computer scientists from the University of Washington (U.W.) in Seattle now reports that they have successfully tapped into this human problem-solving potential. Their competitive online game "Foldit," released in 2008, enlists the help of online puzzle-solvers to help crack one of science's most intractable mysteries—how proteins fold into their complex three-dimensional forms. The "puzzles" gamers solve are 3-D representations of partially folded proteins, which players manipulate and reshape to achieve the greatest number of points. The scores are based on biochemical measures of how well the players' final structure matches the way the protein appears in nature. Understanding how proteins achieve their optimal, functional 3-D form is no simple task. So what's next for Foldit?
Supergiant Games » Blog Archive » Enemy Design
Posted by Amir on April 9, 2010 Our friend Greg Kasavin, who we worked with at EALA, has started an awesome blog about games and narrative featuring exactly the kind of insight and wit that made him one of the sharpest developers we’ve ever designed with. His most recent post covers video game villains, the “bad guys who overcompensate for their flat desires with huge lifebars.” He covers notable bad guys from Bowser to Mike Tyson and even the garden-variety undead in Plants vs. Zombies about whom he observers “the zombies are sincerely hungry for brains — you’d want to give them your brains if you didn’t need them.” Is Mario the only game with an awesome jelly fish enemy? This is all relevant because we’ve been thinking a lot about antagonism, antagonists and enemy design. Speaking of inspired creature design, Max from Unknown Worlds – the guys working on Natural Selection 2 – played our game recently at Thirsty Bear in San Francisco.
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Home : Articles Gas Powered Games Interview - Part 1 After leading Cavedog Entertainment through the critically acclaimed release of Total Annihilation , Chris Taylor formed Gas Powered Games. In this extensive interview, we visit their headquarters. Washington is a state with a rich history of gaming innovators. I had the fortunate opportunity to stop by the offices of Gas Powered Games to speak with Chris Taylor – founder and lead designer, as well as several members of his team in various departments to discuss gaming history and design, technology, and the climate of Washington state as one of the “big three” locations in the United States for game development and publishing. Within certain genres of gaming exist some very specific stereotypes when gameplay, mechanics, and technology are concerned. Traditionally, Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games were known for isometric God-like displays where the player could easily watch over and micromanage all aspects of his or her campaign.
Phylo: A Citizen Science Approach for Improving Multiple Sequence Alignment
Background Comparative genomics, or the study of the relationships of genome structure and function across different species, offers a powerful tool for studying evolution, annotating genomes, and understanding the causes of various genetic disorders. However, aligning multiple sequences of DNA, an essential intermediate step for most types of analyses, is a difficult computational task. In parallel, citizen science, an approach that takes advantage of the fact that the human brain is exquisitely tuned to solving specific types of problems, is becoming increasingly popular. There, instances of hard computational problems are dispatched to a crowd of non-expert human game players and solutions are sent back to a central server. Methodology/Principal Findings We introduce Phylo, a human-based computing framework applying “crowd sourcing” techniques to solve the Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) problem. Conclusions/Significance Figures Copyright: © 2012 Kawrykow et al. Introduction Results
