The title of this post is lifted directly from the pages I link to below. As someone who never has time for gaming anymore but loves the idea of free games that don’t suck, I link to the following in the hope that one day I will join you galloping in the lush meadows of free time.
Page 1 - Free Games That Don’t Suck!
Page 2 - Free Games That Don’t Suck!
Page 3 - Free Games That Don’t Suck!
LINKS
Top 100 Independent Games [gametunnel.com]
Auckland International Film Festival
Who made this website? And why does it suck? This happens every year and I don’t understand why. This is not good design, it frustrates my attempts to click on different links and open them in new tabs. Why is only the text and not the whole block clickable? After I opened 15 new tabs of films I was interested in seeing, Firefox 2.0 crashed and then caused my computer to hemorrhage trying to restore the previous session. Website crashes Firefox? Tick!
If you’re going to some festival films drop me a line with what ones you’re seeing.
We are meant to be here
Such a notion often requires an absence of pride. We as a people are not good at doing this. I am human, I know it all.
The Lamest Wikipedia Edit Wars
You might have passed over the Lamest Wikipedia Edit Wars the first time. I encourage you to give it another go. Watch as we strive for excellence. Watch as the validty of Spyro The Dragon’s inclusion in the Crash Bandicoot article is debated in detail:
* Calm down, kid. As I’ve explained numerous times, those situations are not the same. And if they were, I’d argue for them to be changed too. As for the Pirahna Plants, why do they link to a Mario page? Because they’re Mario in origin. Just like Spyro is, well, Spyro in origin. Doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be noted on the template. He features in a number of Crash games, therefore he’s part of the Crash “universe”, therefore he should be in the template. It’s that simple.* And, as WE’VE (all three of us) have explained to you (or tried to), the situations ARE the same, you’re just insisting that they aren’t the same so your opinion can, once again, be portrayed as fact. And the plants in Crash are NOT Mario in origin, they’re a totally different plant. Spyro IS Spyro in original, so he is NOT a Crash character. Yes, we KNOW he’s been IN several Crash games, but that does NOT make him a Crash character. He is STILL a Spyro character. Will you give it up already?
* All three of you? The only person to comment here (other then you, myself and Klaus Kratchet) agreed with me. As I’ve said, those situations are not the same, with the possible exception of Nights and Sonic, and if that’s the case, I think that should be changed too. What’s your point?If the Pirahana Plants are not taken from Mario, why does the link go to a Mario page? Obviously they’re considered to be a ‘cameo” or a reference to Mario, or whatever. The point is, they appear in several games, like Spyro, they’re recognised as coming from another series, like Spyro, and they should be in the template, like Spyro.
* Further proof that you ae incapable of reading. We’ve repeated this information numerous times…they are NOT the same flipping plant! Sheesh! You’re a rock, you know that? It’s impossile to get blood out of you. (more)
For a long time the Donghua bosses, Fei and Bao (known even to employees as Little Bai and Brother Bao), could do no more than nurse their envy of the raiding guilds’ access to the end game. But Fan’s prowess pointed to another way of looking at it: raiding guilds weren’t the competition, they realized; they were the solution. Donghua would put together a team of 40 employees. They would train the team in all the hardest dungeons. And then, for a few hundred dollars, the team would escort any customer into the dungeon of his or her choice. And when the customer’s longed-for item dropped, the team would stand aside and let the customer take it, no questions asked. Thus would the supposedly unmarketable end-game treasures find their way into the R.M.T. market. And thus would gold farming, of a sort, find its way at last into the end game.
When Brother Bao and Little Bai put their team together in April of last year, Min Qinghai, a veteran Donghua employee at the time, was among the first to make the roster.
“Before I joined the raiding team, I’d never worked together with so many people,” Min told me. They were 40 young men in three adjoining office spaces, and it was chaotic at first. Two or three supervisors moved among them, calling out orders like generals. A dungeon raid is always a puzzle: figuring out which tactics to use to kill each boss is the main challenge; doing so while coordinating 40 players can be dizzying. But members of the team raided just as diligently as they had power-leveled: 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, making their way through the complexities of a different dungeon every day.
The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer [nytimes.com]
Only nine years late, via Speaking Freely, I am reading the paper ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine‘ (a.k.a Google) by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
I liked this bit about the Google crawler interrupting an online game:
It turns out that running a crawler which connects to more than half a million servers, and generates tens of millions of log entries generates a fair amount of email and phone calls. Because of the vast number of people coming on line, there are always those who do not know what a crawler is, because this is the first one they have seen. Almost daily, we receive an email something like, “Wow, you looked at a lot of pages from my web site. How did you like it?” There are also some people who do not know about the robots exclusion protocol, and think their page should be protected from indexing by a statement like, “This page is copyrighted and should not be indexed”, which needless to say is difficult for web crawlers to understand. Also, because of the huge amount of data involved, unexpected things will happen. For example, our system tried to crawl an online game. This resulted in lots of garbage messages in the middle of their game! It turns out this was an easy problem to fix. But this problem had not come up until we had downloaded tens of millions of pages. Because of the immense variation in web pages and servers, it is virtually impossible to test a crawler without running it on large part of the Internet. Invariably, there are hundreds of obscure problems which may only occur on one page out of the whole web and cause the crawler to crash, or worse, cause unpredictable or incorrect behavior. Systems which access large parts of the Internet need to be designed to be very robust and carefully tested. Since large complex systems such as crawlers will invariably cause problems, there needs to be significant resources devoted to reading the email and solving these problems as they come up.
Source: ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine‘ Brin/Page, p. 10
It is also interesting to note the beginnings of Google Book Search in the acknowledgements:
The research described here was conducted as part of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-9411306. Funding for this cooperative agreement is also provided by DARPA and NASA, and by Interval Research, and the industrial partners of the Stanford Digital Libraries Project.
Source: ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine‘ Brin/Page, p. 16
Note also their thoughts on the relationship of search engines and advertising:
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is “The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention”, a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Source: ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine‘ Brin/Page, p. 18
Writing about the current use of the politics of fear in the USA, Henry Jenkins nails an often overlooked aspect of the how-to-legislate-computer-games conversation.
A key element of the campaign against fear would be the need to create a space where young people could speak about their own experiences with digital media and be taken seriously on their own terms. This is going to be hard to pull off because even well meaning groups have a tendency to patronize or suppress aspects of youth expression. In Convergence Culture, I raised the question of whether free speech advocates in the Muggles for Harry Potter campaign may have promoted the right of young people to read J.K. Rowling’s books at the expense of forcing them to recant their fantasy lives. Young person after young person posted messages explaining that they knew that the world of Hogwarts was purely fantasy and that it had no meaningful connection to their everyday lives. Something similar happens when gamers try to defend their relationship to violent video games: they end up arguing that Grand Theft Auto is “only a game” and that it doesn’t have any influence on their everyday lives. Surely, there needs to be a space for meaningful fantasy in our discourse about the right of people to participate in their culture.
Via GamePolitics.
Clever game…Valve have crafted an enjoyable add-on to the original. Read the Four Fat Chicks review.
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