me online

I just played through Heavy Rain, great game barring one major plot hole :).  Aside from the amazing characters and sense of empathy one develops for them (among other things).  I was most impressed with their simple “read and react” mechanic - big icons flash on the screen (analog gestures, button presses and such) and you have to follow them in a timely manner.  It worked especially well for Heavy Rain as it simplified the game and helped move the story along. 

This is nothing new in video games, in fact I’d argue most games already do just this.  These guys (and others) just cut the bull and don’t mask these “instructions” as cues in the environment or enemies.  

Here’s to simple gameplay

Excerpt from The Paradox of Choice

Daniel Kahneman and colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasuable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the expereiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended.

They had some cool examples where given two equally bad experiences, one was perceived as “less bad” if there was an added bit at the end that was more pleasurable.

Maybe that’s why girls dig jerks - because they only need to be good at the end of the night! *boom boom cchhh* haha, sorry.

Pretty cool programs that are able to break a sentence down into their individual components (nouns, adjectives, verbs, …)

Stanford Parser
http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/

University of Tokyo

http://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~tsuruoka/postagger/
http://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/enju/

Please add (in comments) if you know others

At dinner the other night, I was head down, enthralled in some iPhone app I already forgot the name of.  My other friends were busily checking emails (as if that Viagra spam couldn’t come soon enough), parsing basketball box scores or texting some unimportant people.  Information has smashed social norms.  We congregate, but we don’t interact.  Isn’t there something wrong with that picture?