Once again, there’s a new trailer in town. This time around, we’ll pay a visit to some kinda hos­pi­tal dubbed “Med­ical Pavil­ion”. To be hon­est, I wouldn’t want to get a treat­ment there. Not even with my life depend­ing on it … but see for yourself:

Finally, we’re able to buy the long awaited PS3 in Europe too. On Sat­ur­day, my room­mate decided to go and get one of the infa­mous Playsta­tion 3 con­soles. Of course, we needed a sec­ond con­troller and a HDMI cable too, to enjoy the graph­ics galore. Any­way, every­thing went accord­ing to plan until my room­mate tried to inte­grate the PS3 into our wire­less net­work. It absolutely didn’t work and for some rea­son the con­sole insisted that “A con­nec­tion error has occurred (8013013E)”. Yes­ter­day I had a look at the set­tings and deemed them quite fine, so what exactly is the problem?

I typed var­i­ous com­bi­na­tions of “Linksys”, “PS3″, “net­work”, “issues”, “wire­less” and “error” into Google but I didn’t find con­clu­sive infor­ma­tion. By the way, the offi­cial site doesn’t offer any help­ful advice too. Any­way, I tried chang­ing var­i­ous set­tings but noth­ing worked out. In the end, I changed secu­rity on my router and sud­denly I was able to estab­lish a con­nec­tion. I went from WEP – which isn’t very secure, I know – to WPA2 and that was all the PS3 needed to work. Well, strange that it didn’t work with WEP enabled. Ulti­mately, the goal was achieved and the PS3 is fully func­tional. I’ll think about wiring it when I next move my fur­nish­ings, I promise.

After­wards, I spent two hours play­ing Ridge Racer 7 and then I hooked up to MotorStorm for another three hours. I enjoyed both games but MotorStorm is much more fun. The next games I’d like to test are Tekken 5: Dark Res­ur­rec­tion, Vir­tua Fighter 5 and Resis­tance: Fall of Men. We only got the lat­ter gamer so we will have to pay our local PS3 games dealer a visit. That’s all there is to it for now. Have a nice day

Last Fri­day, I and my friend Dave went bowl­ing. It was fun but it soon turned into some­thing else. He com­pletely and utterly destroyed me. I was infin­i­tes­i­mally hand­i­capped but I don’t hold that against him. He sim­ply got the bet­ter of me and won most of the games that evening. Any­way, after­wards we dropped into a nice pub where we drank some some beer and talked about lotta things. I brought up a topic which is cur­rently very inter­est­ing to me – Future Shock. It’s a word that every­body should know.

It’s all about reach­ing the Sin­gu­lar­ity which is a pre­dicted future event where a nor­mal human being won’t be able to under­stand tech­no­log­i­cal progress with­out aux­il­iary means. Even now there’s a huge per­cent­age of humans unable to com­pre­hend exist­ing tech­nolo­gies. That leads us to the impor­tant ques­tion: should the Sin­gu­lar­ity be viewed as a pos­i­tive event or a dan­ger­ous one? Should we work to has­ten it’s arrival or try to pre­vent it from hap­pen­ing – if that’s even pos­si­ble? I for one like tech­no­log­i­cal progress and the idea of intel­li­gence ampli­fi­ca­tion. Tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments have much to offer for humanity.

The down­side is that – as it is the case with almost every­thing – it can be abused. Peo­ple can use it to wreak more havoc, to influ­ence and con­trol other peo­ple, or to spy on every aspect of our lives. Just imag­ine, you got some implants allow­ing you to see things before your vir­tual eye just by think­ing of them and you’re read­ing the lat­est tech news your spawned agents have gath­ered on the web when, all of a sud­den, a pretty nasty com­mer­cial sneaks through your fire­wall and keeps annoy­ing you until you can finally adjust your fil­ters and ban it from your vision. You may now think that’s pretty straight-forward, and I agree. That doesn’t mean it won’t hap­pen in the next 20 years. I’d surely make use of such a tech­nol­ogy if could get my hands on it.

Ulti­mately, it all comes down to band­width and that’s what peo­ple in First World coun­tries are in the process of being served. Over the last decade, the demand for high band­width con­nec­tions has grown rapidly and there’s no end in sight. Dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion is becom­ing ever more impor­tant in our daily lives and peo­ple like to access their stuff from every­where. As a heavy inter­net user I own a high speed con­nec­tion (cur­rently capped at 8 Mbit/s) which is more than suf­fi­cient for my needs but it still is very far from offer­ing instan­ta­neous results. I’d very much like to see a phe­nom­e­non called quan­tum entan­gle­ment being uti­lized for trans­fer­ring infor­ma­tion. Right now, it may be uncon­ceiv­able but I’m con­vinced that I’m gonna see that far sooner than expected.

Ah, I’m just a dreamer but these dreams have a cer­tain appeal …

Today, I received a mail con­tain­ing inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion on the upcom­ing TV show Sanc­tu­ary. For those of you who still don’t know what Sanc­tu­ary is about, here’s the syn­op­sis. As for the mail I received, Canada’s Daily Planet recently cov­ered Sanc­tu­ary on the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel. The spot is six min­utes long and includes inter­views with Amanda Tap­ping and Mar­tin Wood. In addi­tion, we got to see the first footage from the show and a look at the video game pro­duc­tion tech­nol­ogy uti­lized to gen­er­ate entire sets. Sanc­tu­ary is almost com­pletely pro­duced in green screen, adding hun­dreds of hours to post-production. This approach taps a new poten­tial and takes the term inter­ac­tive enter­tain­ment to a new level. The new show will release on the inter­net in May and later as a com­puter game. So, with­out fur­ther ado, here’s the clip:

Yes­ter­day I dis­cov­ered some­thing very inter­est­ing. An enter­prise called Emo­tiv Sys­tems intro­duced some kinda hel­met that allows gamers to con­trol games with their mind. Thus, it’s safe to call it a brain/computer inter­face. The sys­tem is called Project Epoc and it can move objects based on gamer’s thoughts, reflect facial expres­sions, and respond to the excite­ment or calm the user men­tally exerts. The hel­met con­tains lots of sen­sors which pick up elec­tric sig­nals in the brain. The soft­ware part ana­lyzes the sig­nals and wire­lessly relays them to a receiver which is plugged into the USB port of a game con­sole or PC.

The devel­op­ers all share the same vision: to trans­form the way humans inter­act with machines. They’re going to develop this tech­nol­ogy for use in other indus­tries too, includ­ing med­i­cine, secu­rity, mar­ket research, and inter­ac­tive tele­vi­sion. Cur­rently, the hel­met on dis­play at GDC is a pro­to­type and some video footage indi­cates that it takes a high level of con­cen­tra­tion to actu­ally make things hap­pen. Nonethe­less, it’s an impor­tant step into the right direc­tion: cre­at­ing a highly effi­cient inter­face between humans and machines. Accord­ing to Emo­tiv Sys­tems we’re going to see the device on the mar­ket in 2008.

Pretty cool stuff, isn’t it? Fright­en­ing too.

I love play­ing video games. If they’re well done, that is. And that’s the really dif­fi­cult part. What ele­ments must a game have to make you love it? Kick-ass graph­ics? A good plot? Free­dom of choice? An inno­v­a­tive inter­ac­tion sys­tem? Intu­itive con­trols? Cin­e­mato­graphic sequences? And there are many more things peo­ple name when asked why they like a game. One of my all-time heroes, War­ren Spec­tor, the cre­ative mind behind great games like Wing Com­man­der, Sys­tem Shock, Deus Ex, and Thief, yes­ter­day gave a talk about writ­ing and nar­ra­tives in games at the GDC. Gama­su­tra has the essen­tial bits over here. The guys from Next Gen­er­a­tion have a story too.

They also have an inter­view with War­ren which is very infor­ma­tive. There he makes a point of hav­ing “a unique expe­ri­ence”. In short, inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling is what it really boils down to. I don’t need the most beau­ti­ful and amaz­ing graph­ics engine avail­able today to enjoy a game if the story enthralls me. By the way, there’s a short sum­mary of dif­fer­ent sto­ry­telling tech­niques over at Next Gen­er­a­tion. In ret­ro­spect, you should also have a look at this arti­cle which tack­les the emo­tional side of games.

On a side note, War­ren also men­tioned a new method of episodic dis­tri­b­u­tion he thought of for a long time. Well, his plans were thwarted by peo­ple who obvi­ously don’t have a clue. Accord­ing to Spec­tor, all the answer he ever got was some­thing like “it’s five years to early for this”. Unbe­liev­able, isn’t it? I always though they want to make a shit­load of money. At least, War­ren is con­vinced that dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion and episodic con­tent are a big part of our future. And I def­i­nitely agree with him that cur­rently nobody is approach­ing devel­op­ment in the best way to do things episodically.

Gamers should demand more depth and free­dom in games. Any­body who tells me that qual­ity doesn’t sell is short-sighted to the extreme. Per­haps, if the qual­ity goes up the num­ber of soft­ware pirates goes down? To my mind, peo­ple rather down­load a game than pay for it if they think it’s not worth the money. Nei­ther will I buy a game I can beat within 10 hours nor am I going to buy that such a game for my kids. A game has to offer more than just a few hours of amaz­ing graph­ics which seems to be a really sad trend right now. That’s why the term next-gen is so ridicu­lous. It’s next-gen graph­ics only and that’s not going to help. I want next-gen story-telling and next-gen inter­ac­tion. I want to roam a vir­tual world with the pos­si­bil­ity to to what­ever I like to do.