For science!

Ah, Doom. Who knows where we'd be today if it weren't for the innovation that made you the granddaddy of first-person shooters? Probably one of the things that's helping to keep id Software's iconic game alive after all these years is the fact that it can be ported to just about anything. It's even possible to play Doom inside Doom itself.

As you can imagine, many people have attempted to see what crazy methods they can to play this legendary FPS. Now, some scientists are doing something a little different. Namely, they want to see if it's possible to grow their own neurons that can be taught to play games. And yes, they want to see if they will be able to control Doom.

A video from the YouTube channel The Thought Emporium goes into detail about the hypothesis. The basic idea is to be able to hook up some lab-grown rat neurons to a computer that will be able to play Doom, at least in a rudimentary fashion.

//youtu.be/bEXefdbQDjw

This latest video begins with the initial attempt at growing neurons (did you know you could just buy neurons off the internet?), which are fed specific chemicals in order to keep them healthy. A roadmap shows the steps that need to be taken in order to get this basic brain to play Doom.

How will the neurons know they're playing Doom?

Obviously, this is a very complicated process, and there are multiple steps (and sub-steps) before the desired result can be achieved. It also doesn't sound like it's going to be playing Doom the way you and I would.

In this instance, The Thought Emporium intends to "reward" the grown neurons through sound, as they won't be able to actually see what they're doing in the game. For example, a sound they'll "like" (in the loosest term) will be emitted when they kill a demon or do something they're supposed to do. Conversely, a sound they "dislike" will be emitted if they do something they shouldn't, such as fal??ling into toxic waste and dying.

Back in 2021, another scientist wanted to see if rats could play Doom 2 by controlling a sphere that was hook?ed up to the game. What this newest experiment does is even more mind-melting. Actually growing neurons in a lab in order to play video games is something only the? maddest of scientists with the craziest of hairstyles would ever attempt.

The post Scientists are trying ?to grow neurons that can play Doom appeared first on Destructoid.

Does this mean we're getting a rat pro league?

With access to an endless stream of information and content on the internet, sometimes you think you've seen it all. Thankfully, though, something comes along every once in a while that proves you wrong, and that happened to me today when I found that there's a scientist who taught his rats how to play Doom II. This is so ridiculous, it has to be part of some important project for the good of mankind, right? Oh what's that? Hungarian software engi??neer and neuroscientist Viktor Tóth just got bored one day and decided he wanted?? to teach his little furry friends how to play video games?

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMNxkQXwykA

Okay so turns out he was actually just curious to learn more about brain computer interfaces, and thought this might be a good way to test them out. But still, it's pretty ??hilarious that this i??s how he chose to go about it. His setup includes a large ball made out of a material called polystyrene, a plastic that's often used in food packaging.

To play Doom, the rats were placed on top of the sphere where they could use the pressure from their feet?? to move around the game's map, while also being fitted into a harness so they d?on't fall off. Finally, the rats also had a little tube in front of them that would dispense treats when they did something right.

Tóth says he specifically chose the first level of Doom II to train the rats because it was simple, and a large enough area for the rats to walk around and explore. "I was able to scrap the first corridor out of the map and make the doors open on touch when a rat approached it," he said, "there’s no button they need to press or behavior they need to exhibit to actually?? open doors." Even with these modifications, one of the rats named Romero ended up getting confused when he encountered his first enemy.

Tóth goes on to explain that even when imposing a deadline on himself to get the rats trained up in time, they?? still have to learn at their own pace.

//twitter.com/TonyHoWasHere/s??tatus/1470450?782763950089?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1470450782763950089%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ffuturism.com%2Fviktor-toth-doom-rat

When asked about his plans to create a Twitch channel for the rats, Tóth gave a hesitant yes. "It's a ver??y valid way to monetize a project like this. The only problem is how long the?? rat can run for," he said.

Well I don't know about you guys, but this is absolutely something that I would tune in to watch. These rats are so adorable, and it's kind of cool that Tóth is spreading the love of gaming to another species. If you're interesting in learning more about the process, too, I recommend reading the full interview on Futurism's website.

The post A scientis?t might start a Twitch channel for his rats that? play Doom appeared first on Destructoid.

The next best thing to a potential Endless Ocean 3

E-Line Media's oceanic adventure Beyond Blue launched last week on Apple Arcade, and while I adore the premise of an educational-focused diving game produced in collaboration with BBC Studios, I can't exactly say that's something I want to experience on a cramped phone screen. I'd much rather soak up the soothing ambi?ance on a TV. Thankfully, the Apple exclusivity window won't last for too long.

Revealed on an Earth Day live stream, Beyond Blue is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox On??e on June 11, 2020 – the same week as World Oceans Day. In the game, you'll go on eight dives and use near-future technologies? to "see, hear, and interact with the ocean in a meaningful way."

"We have taken care to craft a visual and audio experience that immerses players in the beauty of the ocean and the amazing creatures that inhabit it, while hopefully doing so with some interpretation and artistry," said creative director Michael Angst. "Players will explore diverse environments ranging from a sun-dappled, oasis-like atoll down through the gauzy blue 'twilight' zone where only the faintest amount of light reaches to the midnight of the abyssal zone, where rarely seen creatures produce their own light in an environment otherwise devoid of light." There's an eerie beauty, for sure.

It's not going to be the most thrilling game, but I appreciate a calm approach. I also love that the soundtrack is a mix of Miles Davis, The Flaming Lips, and original compositions. Making the most of the BBC partnership, Beyond Blue has 16 "Ocean Insights" mini-documentaries with real-wo??rld footage.

Basically, if you dug Blue Planet and need more of those vibes in your life, you've got to check this game out. The Apple Arcade version is certainly one option – especially if you can play on Apple TV – but I'll be holding out for the wider release. Beyond Blue will cost $19.99 when it launches June 11.

Now if we can just get Endless Ocean on Switch.

The post Und??erwater adventure Beyond Blue coming to PC, PS4, and Xbox One in June appeared first on Destructoid.

Seriously, get out of here

In today's contest you can win a Steam copy of space simulator Meeple Station!

It keeps coming up in these contests lately, but man Earth kinda sucks right now. We've done plenty of building and management, but the planet has struck back. So, let's get outta here while we ??still can.

While I can't actually help you physically escape, I can help you mentally escape! We've got Steam copies space simulator Meeple Station up for grabs, fresh out of Early Access. Win one and spend s????ome time in space.

This is being transmitted directly from space:

Meeple Station is a sci-fi sim set on a space station you build, inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld. Meeple are simple creatures. They're not human, nor are they incredibly intelligent. They're a race ?of space fairing beings who enjoy indu??stry, work, and exploration. But they need a lot of guidance, YOUR guidance, in fact. Build everything from simple furniture, like bedding and seating, to complex machinery, life support and power grids. You choose where and how to build it all, and your Meeple will have to adjust to your changes.

• Open ended campaign objectives
• Explore the universe with your space station (and scout ships)
• Discover new artifacts and explore new Meeple stuff
• Research new and exciting Meeple Technologies
• Manage and accommodate many Meeple with a mind of their own
• Custom design and build your very own Meeple Space Station
• Highly moddable

No?t human, not incredibly intelligent are phrases typically used to describe me.

To enter to win, use the w??idget below to leave your name and email address. You can enter daily. Click around in the widget for way?s to earn bonus entries to help increase your odds of winning.

We have five Steam keys available; winners will be drawn Thursday, April 17. Head over to PC Invasion for more chances to win a copy!

Meeple Station is available now on Steam.

Dtoid Contest??: Escap??e the perils of Earth with a Steam copy of space sim Meeple Station

The post Contest: Escape the perils of Ea??rth with a Steam copy of?? space sim Meeple Station appeared first on Destructoid.

Now You're Playing with Power

2K Games has released a new mini-game within its looter-shooter Borderlands 3. Borderlands Science is a neon-infused tile-puzzler which, just by player interaction, helps decode the mysteri??es of human biomes, helping to save hundreds of thousands of hours in A.I. coding.

Here's how it works: While playing Borderlands Science, players are tasked with matching up coloured titles - emblazoned with the faces of popular Borderlands' characters. Matching up titles by shape and colour creates combos, reminiscent of classic puzzlers such as Tetris and Puyo Puyo.

All of these in-game tiles - behind the curtain - represent microbes that exist within the human body, microbes that can be responsible for ailments and illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's. Because trillions of these microbes exist, it's difficult for computers to recognise them, and then relate patterns of probable cause. But, through the act of playing Borderlands Science and linking these coloured tiles, players are helpi??ng to construct new A.I. algorithms. In essence, playing the game helps teach computers how to identify certain microbes and relate them to e?ach other. This information will then be made readily accessible to a worldwide network of scientists and servers.

Borderlands Science was created via a conglomerate including 2K Games, McGill University, Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS), and The Microsetta Initiative at UC San Diego School of Medicine. In-game narration is provided by scientist and Big Bang Theory star Dr. Mayim Bialik.

"We are always looking for new partners in the field of gaming, and this is a perfect fit for us," said Massively Multiplayer Online Science CEO Attila Szantner. "We created MMOS to connect scientific research and video games as a seamless gaming experience, and that is exactly what this has become. I believe that Borderlands 3 players advancing micr??obiome research will change how we think about video games."

Borderlands Science can be accessed via Doctor Tannis' infirmary in Borderlands 3. For more information on Borderlands Science and its creation, visit the official Borderlands website.

The post Amazing mini-game Borderlands ??Science hopes to advance vital medica?l research appeared first on Destructoid.

Alongside a $250,000 donation

Shit got a little too real. Just before the global outbreak of COVID-19, Plague Inc saw a spike in concurrent players as people evidently wanted to simulate how an epidemic-turned-pandemic could potentially wipe out civilization. Plague Inc developers Nd??emic Creations pled that the game shouldn't be viewed as a scientific model, but that didn't stop curious minds from trying to digitally forecast the apocalyp?se.

Now that everything has gone completely sideways, Ndemic is giving Plague Inc a 180-degree face turn. It's working on a free mode where you attempt to save the world, ridding it of a pandemic. Ndemic describes this new mode by saying "Players will have to balance managing disease progression and boosting healthcare systems as well as controlling real-world action?s such as triaging, quarantining, social distancing and closing of public services." Just like the base game, this spin will be similarly scientific?. Ndemic is consulting experts from groups such as the World Health Organization and the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.

Ndemic is doing more to fight coronavirus than just working on Plague Inc. It also donated $250,000 to the cause, ?w?hich is being split between the Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the World Health Organization. 

Plague Inc Gives? a Quarter of a Million Dollars to Fight COVID-19 [Ndemic Creations]

The post Plague Inc. is get?ting a free mode where yo?u save the world appeared first on Destructoid.

We've got a TON of stuff to give away!

We're celebrating 10 years of Star Trek Online with a massive key giveaway, as well as holding a contest to give out special STO Anniversary Badges!

Have you been playing Star Trek Online for its entire 10-year existence? That's crazy! I can't imagine doing anyt?hing for ten years. Maybe not even ten minutes. I have a v?ery, very low attention span.

Whether you've been along for the full ride, are new, or somewhere in between, you'll love today's contest. To celebrate the release of the Legacy content in conjunction with ten years of space exploration, we're giving away a ton of content for the game, featuring an actual Star Trek Online Anniver?sary Badge. That you can wear. Like,? everywhere. So come win it!

Star Trek Online: Legacy hit the digital space today, adding more content to an already packed game. Along with new ships and other content, the new expansion adds Seven, as portrayed by Jeri Ryan from Picard, and Michael Burnham, as portrayed by Sonequa Martin-Green in Discovery, to the mix. These new character?s add new missions and scenarios to the? game to bridge the old and new into this now decade-spanning adventure.

Ok, we've g?ot a lot going on here, so scop?e out what we're giving away!

Three Gr?and Prize winners will receive this special Star Trek Online Anniversary Badge, shown above. Wear it to the dentist, or to the mall, or maybe to space itself -- just wear it! Winners will also receive the Federation Fleet Admiral Faction Pack, which includes:

• T6 Valiant (Escort Vessel)
• T6 Andromeda (Cruiser Vessel)
• T6 Pathfinder (Science Vessel)
• 2 Ship Slots
• 1 Caitian Bridge Officer
• Racing Uniform
• 1 Exocomp Pet
• Title: Voyager
• Title: Seeker
• Title: Pathfinder

50 runners-up will receive ??t??he T6 Europa-Class Heavy Battlecruiser. Read about it below because I'm confused!

The Europa-class Heavy Battlecruiser is well-suited to the frontiers of the Federation, whether the mission is one of exploration or defense efforts. It is n??amed after the U.S.S. Europa -- a N??imitz-class vessel lost at the infamous "Battle at the Binary Stars" under the command of Admiral Brett Anderson in 2256. This modern 25th-century counterpart to that ill-fated flagship of yesteryear has been fully outfitted with the latest in team support capabilities, and a substantial array of versatile armaments.

Enter to win using the widget just below. Keep in mind you must have a United States shipping address in order to win, and all keys are for the PC version of STO,?? only. I'll d?raw winners on Wednesday, February 19.

Dtoid Contest: Celebrate 10 years of Star Trek?? Online by taking a key, and winning a special STO Anniversary Badge

While you're waiting, we've got a bonus -- we're giving away totally free conte??nt! We've got 500 keys to give away ??for the Federation Elite Starter Pack, giving players access to:

• T6 Reliant Class - Advanced Light Cruiser (Scales as you level!)
• 12 Inventory Slots
• 12 Bank Slots
• 2 Bridge Officer Slots
• 1 Borg Bridge Officer
• 13 Mark II Very Rare Space Gear
• 7 Mark II Very Rare Ground Gear
• Starfleet Academy Uniform

Sim??ply redeem a key from the other widget below to take one of these bad boys. Grab it fast -- once they're gone, they're gone!

Star Trek Online is available now, and it's free to play!

The post Contest: Celebrate 10 years of St??ar Trek Online by taking a key, and winning a special STO Anniversary Badge appeared first on Destructoid.

Halcyon awaits brave suckers

We're less than two months out from the release of Obsidian's latest RPG The Outer Worlds and to continue building hype towards launch, a trail??er highlighting locales and weapons has been? released.

Sprinkled throughout the trailer are bits of the cynical humor that we've come to know and love from Obsidian as well as a few job-class previews. The trailer really gives off a Fallout: New Vegas feel and seeing as how that's Destructoid's choice for best modern Fallout, I'm sure the feeling is a sorely missed? one among not just myself.

The Outer Worlds will release on October 25 for PS4, Xbox?? One, a??nd PC via the Epic Games Store.

The post Outer Worlds trailer shows off locales and weapons with Obsidian’s trademark humor appeared first on Destructoid.

Body type and voice will be choices

When dealing with a cyberpunk future where the limits of what our bodies can do are endless, it's hard to apply rules and norms from our time. Knowing this, it only feels fitting that in Cyberpunk 2077 the concept of hard gend??ers for the character cr?eator has been augmented.

The new version of the character creator will allow players to choose body and voice types without assigning a gender to the character. Seeing as how the screenshots we saw last year showed specific gender choices, this is a win-win in that it creates a more inclusive game that also feels like a better fit for the world. No word yet on how this change will be handled with in-game dialogue but with your character named V it shouldn't be that hard to make interactions more gender-neutral. According to a Reddit post, the opti??on for hard gender choices will still be available a??long with the option of a more fluid character.

Speaking on the choice to Metro,? Marthe Jonkers, senior concept artist for the game said:

"So you choose your ??body type and we have two voices, one that’s male sounding, one is female sounding. You can mix and match. You can just connect them any way you want. And then we have a lot of extra skin tones and tattoos and hairstyles. So we really want to give people the freedom to make their own character and play the way they want to play."

The fluidity in character creation is apparently not just limi?ted to gender and will also bleed into job classes, another sticking point in the last ??character creation screenshot we saw. In their interview with Metro, Jonkers stated that the game will have this "fluid class system" where you aren't limited in your choices, which again feels more appropriate for the setting.

Cyberpunk 2077 will release for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on April 16,?? next year.

Cyberpunk 2077 Interview [Metro News]

The post Cyberpunk 2077 players will be allowed to eschew gender cho?ices for character creation appeared first on Destructoid.

Zachademics, coming to a school near you

Programming has come a long way from when I was dragged kicking and screaming through my C++ co??urse in college. There are more languages to choose from and more ways to learn than by just reading a book. With so many STEM jobs now requiring at least some programming expertise, there was a gap that needed to be filled in the Edutainment realm.

The team at Zachtronics has taken that need and carved out a nice little niche with their puzzle games that all focus around programming and efficiency in some way. Now they are giving their games away to public and non-profit schools for free to help any latent programmers latch onto the trade at an early age. Included in the offer are TIS-100, Infinifactory, Exapunks, Shenzen I/O, and Opus Magnum.

Schools that are interested may get more information at Zachademics. The process seems simple enough with some small information needed before approval. This type o??f altruism is always nice to see coming out of the gaming industry as educational games are few and far between at this point, so when those rare developers make it as easy as possible for schools to get their games, it's a great thing.

For those of you not in school, all Zachtronic games are available currently for PC, with Infinifactory available for PlayStation 4 as well.

The post Developer of TIS-100 and Opus Magnum is giving their catalog of programming g??ames to schools for free appeared first on Destructoid.

It's all the stuff nurses say to you before giving you a shot

[Editor's Note: One thing that has been made quite evident over the past several weeks is Hollywood has no problem weaponizing the audience's fear of spoilers to their advantage. The urgency to avoid all spoilers and see Avengers: Endgame opening weekend, when studios make the most money on each ticket sold, pushed it to break box office records. Game of Thrones similarly saw record numbers of people watching each episode of its final season right when it aired lest the latest character death be spoiled on Twitter.

The word "spoil" is just another way to say ruin, and the idea that a film or tv show or game is spoiled for you means that the ultimate experience is ruined. Studies have shown that's not always the case, and as Jonathan Holmes explains below, hearing a spoiler for something you're excited about doesn't have to be a devastating experience if you know how to properly handle it.]

I’ve been writing about video games for a little more than 10 ye??ars now, and for most of that time, I actually did something in a totally different field for a full-time job. Among other things, I’ve helped people deal with the difficult thoughts and feelings, usually stemming from unwanted life events like the loss of a loved one, the end of a relationship, and other more damagin?g stuff.

By those standards, an unwanted event like stumbling upon a spoiler might seem like small potatoes, but there’s no ?use in trying to co?mpare one person to another. It’s more productive to try to use the strategies that help people with one kind of stress to help even more people. So that’s what I did, and I think it might have worked.

So what do spoilers have in common with more serious emotional issues like anxiety or grief? Well for starters, lear?ning something you don’t want to know and being treated in a way that you don’t want to be treated lead to unwanted feelings. In fact, I’ve been told by plenty of people over the years that what bothers them most about spoilers is the fact that the person doing the spoiling was intentionally trying to make their lives worse, even if it’s ever so slightly.

Case in point, this guy who got punched for spoiling Avengers: Endgame. He probably wouldn’t have been haymakered if he accidentally revealed the movie’s plot to some strangers. It’s the fact that he did it on purpose, to a crowd, that led to him being seen as a threat of some kind. His intentional disrespect was an attack of sorts, which led people to feel justified in fighting back in whatever way felt right to them. I’m certainly not justifying the act of assaulting someone who is trying to ruin a movie ?for you, but from a psychological perspective, the cause and effect makes sense.

We can’t control what other people do to us or how their actions make us feel, and when we feel attacked, we have the urge to fight back. It feels empowering at the moment, but regardless of what kind of revenge we enact on others who have harmed us, we’re still stuck with the damage they’ve caused??. That’s why, when given the choice, I usually advise people to take control of themselves instead of trying to control others. We don’t control what happens to us and how the events in our lives stimulate our brains, but we do have the ability?? to control what thoughts we access, then act upon, based on these feelings.

Just like how exercising your body can help you to be ready for the sudden need to exert physical strength, there are exercises for your mind that can help you t??o keep it functioning in the ways that work best for you. For example, if you do something that makes you feel empowered and in control before going to school in?? the morning, you are less likely to experience a fear reaction later in the day. By setting the stage for successful thoughts at a later date, you do your future self a favor.

Spoilers, as a rule, prime people in the opposite way. Stumbling on any unwanted information is disempower??ing and discouraging, and that feeling primes us to feel bad about whatever experiences we have next.

Knowing that priming can affect?? us so strongly either way led me to develop a simple, straight-forward system that works to prevent spoilers from affecting people as strongly. This method was tested on 100 people, and the results w??ere encouraging. I’m calling it the “4D method” for now, but if you have a better name, let me know. Here’s how the experiment worked.

One-hundred people agreed to have the central plot twist of Captain Marvel spoiled for them. To create a realistic sample, eight children ages 8-13, and seven teenagers ages 13-17 were included, with parental consent of course. They all rated a high irritation with story spoilers and investment in the larger story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. None of them know me personally. All 100 of them received the spoiler, but 50 of them were given the instructions for the “4D method” immediately after. They had to complete every step in the method in less than 20 minutes for their input to be valid, as information that is retained for more than that time is much more likely to make it to your? long-term memory.

The results were on a scale from one to four. People who did receive the 4D method rated their irritation with the spoiler at a 1??.5 after seeing the movie. Those who didn’t receive the method rated at a 2.7. I imagine that second score might have been higher if they weren’t willing participants in this study, as I suspect that one of the things that grant spoilers their power is the fact that we often feel powerless to stop them from entering our brains.

That would re?quir??e further studies. This was just a preliminary, and I hope that real social scientists find this interesting enough to pick up where I left off and see what they can find out.

So just what is my 4D method? I've detailed the four pillars of the concept below. Read them, remember them, and remind yourself to try them out as we get closer to the release of films like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker a??nd whatever Jordan Peele is working on next.

Decatastrophize

The first step is an attempt to lessen the intensity of the initial fight-or-flight response. There is a reason why losing a limb or suffering some other serious injury causes the brain to go into a fear-free auto-pilot mode to help you escape from the immediate danger. If you dwell on how bad something is, you’ll only work to distract yourself from doing something about it and continue to stimulate that amygdala, w??hich makes it really ha??rd to think.

The good news ?is, it should be easier for most of you to decatastrophize the experience of stumbling upon a spoiler than that of losing an arm. In f??act, spoilers may not be as bad for your enjoyment as you may think. There have been plenty of studies on spoilers that show they have a neutral or even positive effect on how much you enjoy something.

I even did my own study a few years ago with 100 college students who rated their enjoyment of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes after being primed in various ways. The subjects were split into four groups. The first wasn’t talked to at all before playing the game, the second had the controversial ending spoiled but were told it was no big deal, the third was told that Ground Zeroes was “the most incredible, important game in the series, and maybe even all of history” and the fourth group was hyped AND spoiled in a similar way at the same time. Everyone in the group had played Peace Walker to completion and were all invested in the story of Naked?? Snake and the gang.

In terms of their overall enjoyment of the game, the group that was spoiled actually enjoyed it the most with an average score?? of 2.9 out of 4. The group that heard nothing was right behind them with a 2.5, then the hype group was way below with a 1.9, lastly the hype and spoiled group was last with a 1.3. Just about all of them went in with their own personal hype at relatively high levels, but it’s still worth noting the spoiled group with low expectations enjoyed the game the most.

That&rsqu??o;s why the first step in the ??spoiler cure is to set all expectations to as low as possible, especially regarding how the spoiler itself will impact you. After being spoiled, quickly say to yourself, “This isn’t a big deal and it’s not going to affect my enjoyment of the story either way.” Then elaborate on those thoughts a few times in your head before you move on to step two. This may seem obvious, but deciding that you believe a spoiler is bad for you will definitely make it worse, and vice versa.

De-legitimize

Similar to decatastrophizing, diminishing your belief that a spoiler is legitimate can go a long way towards weakening how much of it you will remember, and therefore, how much it will alter your experience later on. The fact of the matter is nothing we read on the internet is credible with 100% certainty. Everything is subjective and open to interpretation. Even official trailers, like this one for Avengers: Infinity War?, may contain intentionally falsified information.

That’s why you can tell yourself with confidence after you learn what you think is a spoiler that “This is probably fake.” Doing so will help your brain automatically sort the s?poiler ??into the “unessential information” part of your memory warehouse, along with all the other thousands of pieces?? of information that you experience then forget about on a day-to-day basis. 

Dilute

There is a reason why, in the olden days, phone numbers were only seven digits. On average, a person’s?? short-term memory starts to fill up after storing seven new pieces of info (plus or minus two). That’s part of why I only have four Ds ??in the 4D method. The fewer the Ds, ??the more likely people are to remember them.

There’s also plenty of evidence out there that people don’t always remember where the information in their brain comes from. The difference b??etween dreams and memories can be paper thin, as is the difference between memories of things we did ourselves, and things we remember ??that others have done.

That’s why diluting your brain with new pseudo-spoilers after ingesting a potentially real spoiler can help keep it from taking root in your mind. Let’s say you heard that Dr. Strange’s nemesis Dormammu is going to be played by Steve-O in the next Avengers movie, and you considered that a spoiler. After decatastrophizing and delegitimizing the spoiler, the next step would be to dilute it by quickly listing out seven other actors who might play Do??rmammu, then spend five minutes on Google researching the various different fan theories and wish lists about the character.

Dormammu could easily be played by Weird Al, Steve Buscemi, John Leguizamo, Ted Danson, Seth Rogan, Danny Trejo, or John Cusack in the next movie. If you are willing to look, I'm sure you can find someone who has posed these possibilities at some point or another. This is a more time-consuming task than the first two, and it takes more work, but things that you do?? yourself are more likely to be remembered than things you are taught second-?hand. So?? getting active is a great way to push those unwanted memories out.

Distract

Studies show that heterose??xual men can suffer from short-term memory disruption when ?watching pornography, with higher arousal states being associated with lower level??s of later recall. My guess is that this has to do with the hippocampus shutting? down as it produces stress hormones, just as it does in a fight-or-flight response. Waking up the primitive parts of the brain and letting them take charge can put all other brain functions in the back seat. This is especially true when multi-tasking, where the information you’re sorting through as you move forward with some other goal-oriented task may be performed on auto-pilot.

That’s why the road to the flow state, a dream-like form of consciousness where time and sense of self can disappear almost entirely, is often paved by taxing the brain to its maximum capacity. Tetris is one of the most popular games of all time, thanks in no small part to its ability to get people into the flow state. Not coincidentally, it’s also been proven to reduce the amount of damage ?caused by memories of traumatic events.

The exact way to best distract the brain after experiencing a spoiler is different for everyone. Playing a rhythm game like Rock Band or Rez is one way. Pornography, as previously mentioned, is another. Some may watch clips of movies that always make them laugh or cry, or ?look at old pictures of their favorite people. The exact form of stimuli is less important than the effect it has?? on the brain, which is to push the spotlight away from the spoiler.

Bonus: Decide

There is a fifth step that wasn’t tested on the study group, largely because I couldn’t guarantee that everyone in the test group would actually do it. Still, I’ve done it myself for a long time, and I can attest that it’s personally helped me a ?lot.

I had a relatively big reveal for Avengers: Endgame spoiled for me. After it happened, I went through the 4D steps right away, then before I actually saw the movie, I said to myself multiple times, “I don’t know what’s going to happen in this movie. I might love it or I might hate it, and it’s going to be great to find out either way.” It may seem like a redundant statement when tacked on to t????he other four steps in the 4D strategy, but it really helps to decide exactly where your goal posts are right before you set about something.

By putting them in a place that minimized expectation and maximized curiosity, I was able to focus more on the moment and less about anticipating what was going ?to happen, as it’s during that moment of anticipation that spoilers do their damage. As a result, when the moment I had spoiled ??for me was revealed in the film, I didn’t remember that I even learned of the spoiler for at least five or six seconds afterward. The surprise hit me just as hard as it would have without the spoiler, which in my opinion, is as close to a cure for spoilers as one could hope for.

If you try the 4D method, with the optional D thrown in at the end for good measure, let me know if it worked. At t??he very worst, it can make getting stuck with a spoiler an interesting mental game of self-analysis and assertion of free will. 

J??ust remember everyone, it's all about the Ds. 

The post I may have found the cure for spoilers appeared first on Destructoid.

Twenty nineteen everyone, twenty nineteen

I'm a man of science. I know there are people who are way smarter than I am who know what they are talking about when it comes to their field of study. Even as someone educated in a scientific field, I understand that while I may be an expert, there are others who are far ?more knowledgeable than I and defer to their experiences and studies. When I see anti-intellectualism ??movements like the flat-earth belief or anti-vaxxers, it rightfully boils my blood.

So it warms my science-loving heart to see that Ndemic, the developer of the Plague Inc. strategy game, has embraced a petition to bring the anti-vax movement into their game, in an appropriately mocking way of course. The petition on Change.org, which originally called for 10,000 signatures, was noticed and signal boosted in a tweet by the developers which quickly brought in a cool 20,000+ signatures. This also ma??rks the first time that anything that came from Change.org actually got something done.

While details on the addition are still under wraps, the developers are excited to know that even years after launch, there is still a strong community for the morbid strategy game. Speaking to Eurogamer, developer James Vaughn s??aid:

It's great to see so many people sticking up for science! We're currently working out how Anti-Vaxxers will work in the game - we have a few ideas that we're trying out and running them through our algorithms. The biggest challenge is that if everyone in Plague Inc.'s global simulation suddenly stopped getting vaccinated then it would be a very easy game to win! On a side note, it's amazing that six years after the game was released there is still such a huge and passionate community for Plague Inc. It ?means a lot to us and it makes it a lot of fun to keep working on new updates!

Having only pla??????????????????????????yed a precious few hours of the game, I'm not at liberty to go into de?ep speculation about how this could be implemented well. My best guess would be a single country adopts a policy of no vaccinations but I can't see how this wouldn't just spell the end of that country in short order. Although maybe that's the point? Stupid anti-vaxxers.

Alright, alright! You spoke, we listened. Neurie's very happy to hear that we're going to start figuring out anti-vaxxers soon. He's dying to try and get inside their heads. //t.co/fYq09awgJc pic.twitter.com/Sof0aJE0yw

— Plague Inc. / Rebel Inc. (@NdemicCreations) February 26, 2019

Plague Inc. is ava?ilable on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and mobile platforms.

Plague Inc devs to add anti-vaxxers [Eurogamer]

The post Plague Inc. to add anti-v??axxer player buff to ??game after online petition appeared first on Destructoid.

Tetris once again saves the day

"We live in the darkest timeline" is a phrase I can't get behind. Yes, there are some politicians who would rather we scrounge around in the dirt for our daily meals, but it is the scientists that are continuing our march into the future. Driven by the??ir thirst fo??r knowledge, they are making new discoveries every day that push the boundaries of what we used to think was our limit as a species.

It's only n??atural that these scientists would then make three brains play the greatest game of all time to demonstrate that they care not for the limits our creator has placed on us.

Researchers at the University of Washington have been working on a way to neurally link brains through telepathic means for a while now. Recently using a BrainNet, scientists made three people play a single game of Tetris together cooperatively.

The demonstration was set up where three people hooked into the BrainNet, which uses electroencephalograms (EEG) that read electric impulses in a person's brain and then transmits information into the paired brains using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Two of the participants could see the Tetris board while a third person could not. That third person was the one controlling where the pieces would be placed and used th??e thoughts from the two people who could see the board to ??make their decisions.

Before people start lighting torches an?d grabbing pitchforks demanding to see Tetristein's Monster so they can destroy it, it wasn't exactly that the two who could see the board were sending their thoughts directly into the controlling player's brain. For this early phase of the experiments, LCD lights were used to represent what moves the controller should take.

While this isn't exactly the science fiction future we have? dream?ed of for years, this is where it all begins. This type of basic almost rudimentary use of our brainwaves is one of the steps to reaching the point where brains can interface with one another directly.

Dr. Rajesh Rao, one of the researchers on the project, spoke on the l??imitations of brain-to-brain interface:

"Current brain-to-brain interfaces are extremely limited in the amount of information transmitted between brains, preven?ting practical applications. However, with sufficient advances in brain recording and stimulation technologies, one could imagine networks of connected brains in the future producing innovative and creative solutions to humanity’s most important scientific and societal problems within an ethically responsible framework."

The full research paper is available online for fellow e??ggheads to read about the experim??ent in-depth.

Scientists sho?wcase brain-to-brain ?communication with game of 3-player Tetris [Digital Trends]

The post Scientists u?se Tetris to demonstrate three brains working together appeared first on Destructoid.

YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!

I've always held a fascination with city planning and architecture. My mom still has the drawings of imaginary cities I would make on the back of paper placemats in restaurants and for a brief moment when I was a kid, I wanted to become an architect. I ultimately chose a more chaotic field of study but part of me still loves the order and planning of building a city. I get my city planning jollies by reading the work of Darran Anderson and playing games like Cities: Skyline and Project Highrise.

But what happens when an actual city planner plays the classic SimCity 2000? This past week, Dave Amos, a former city planner and current City Planning Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley uploaded a run of him starting a city from scratch. Using his experi?ence and education, he designed a city that adhered to real-world conventions while also gaming the system to take advantage of the limitation of the 25-year-old game. For example, I never knew that if you placed your power plants at the edge of your map, most of the pollution went out of your city grid and therefore didn't count against you.

Peppered throughout the video are little observations about the things Maxis got right about city planning and some areas where they had to bend reality to make a better game. At one point though Amos flexes his god-like powers and demolishes the oldest city block in town in?? favor of new more expensive residential buildings. Eminent domain ho!

I don't know if I'm the only one but I love these types of videos and articles where real-world experts play and critique games that replicate their professions. While it isn't always the case, game designers get it right more times t?han you would think.

The post Watch a city planner employ eminent doma??in in SimCity?? 2000 appeared first on Destructoid.

But there are barriers to classing it 'Educational'

Nintendo's new Labo software is already proving to be one of the most innovative and interesting new concepts in video games for quite some time. The Toy-Con Garage in particular provides wide-eyed kids with the opportunity to get to grips with basic coding in a rudimentary? but fun manner.

With the marriage of cardboard, consoles and imagination (along with a bucket-load of cash) providing educational potential, ?various UK schools have reportedly contacted Nintendo to ask about the possibilities of getting the Labo software in front of pupils, helping them learn about design, construction and programming while using tools and concepts that they can feel enthusiastic about.

Obviously it isn't as easy as just sending stock out to classrooms and telling the kids to let rip. Not only are Switch consoles and Labo software materials expensive items, but there are a variety of red-tape barriers that must be crossed before your product can be ??officially deemed "educational", thus qualifying for bulk-cost reductions, teacher training, classr?oom support and such.

While it remains to be seen whether Nintendo will enter into an agreement with places of learning to turning their new baby into a genuine, bona-fide tool for education, it's clear that Labo is a product that encourages imagination and design, while also containing elements of software coding, lateral thin?king and problem-solving skills.

As the classroom moves into an age I never experienced, of laptops, iPads and live-streamed lectures, it would?? seem fitting for instruments such as Labo to find their way into the hands of pupils, preparing them for a future in which computer science is as important as your A, B... and, y'know? the next one.

UK schools approach Nintendo about Labo? in the classroom [Gamesindustry.biz]

The post UK schools have reportedly?? approached Ninte??ndo about Labo appeared first on Destructoid.

Do you kids know about cardboard guitars?

Nintendo have released the third video in their Toy-Con Garage series, showing you?? some of the fun inventions you can put together with just some cardboard, some imaginati??on and a $300 video games console.

This video shows how you can use the Toy-Con Garage kit to make a guitar. As always, it involves the cause-and-effect mechanics of the software's "node" system, where the user? redefines sounds and actions based on movement, infra-red sensors, or button presses. In the video, nodes are instructed to play guitar sounds, then rubber bands are used over the touchscreen to create a "strumming" effect.

From there, users can even program other nodes in order to change pitch and effects. This all leads to a Labo band, complete with guitar, drums and two keyboards. It's the best Nintendo music performance since, well... that one.

True story: In the late '70s, cardboard guitars were an actual craze. Metal-heads would cut guitar shapes out of cardboard, then would actually take them to nightclubs to "play" along with the music. In the go-go '80s/'90s, we were t??oo lazy to make props, so we just pretended to play with air.? Less hassle. Just as uncool.

Where was I? Oh yeah, for all the cheese of these videos, I genuinely think Toy-Con Garage is a great concept. With some ingenuity and invention, people ar??e going to come up with some really out-there ideas. I'm looking forward to weird and wonderful YouTube videos when the software launches, Ap?ril 27, on Nintendo Switch.

The post S??tart a metal band with LABO Toy-Co?n Garage guitars appeared first on Destructoid.

You can make a Quote Unquote Cannon

Nintendo have released a follow-up to last week's Labo video, showing how software package Toy-Con Garage can be use??d to ma??ke all manner of fun inventions and games.

The new video starts with t??he creation of a remote-control tank and a pint-sized Kaiju. Using the software's basic coding system, which assigns actions to the Joy-Con's various buttons via "nodes," users can make the tank move using the rumble feat??ure. When the camera picks up the marker sticker on the monster's head, further vibrations will cause the cardboard destroyer of worlds to tumble "Mission Face-Plant accomplished!"...apparently.

Mad on power, the narrator then shows how you can use further nodes to include button presses, add sound effects, and more. We then see the science behind Labo's marker sticker, which interact with the Joy-Con's infra-red beams to create action and reaction. All this leads to a sweet-l?ooking organ grinder device, my favourite Labo invention so far.

Whilst Labo isn't for ?me - and I understand that perhaps jaded sociopaths approachin?g forty are probably not its target audience - I do think some of these home made devices are very cool, and that imaginative kids will create some fascinating tools with it.

The first Nint??endo? Labo kits launch April 27 on Switch.

The post Nintendo demonstrate more ideas with Labo’s Toy-Con Garage in new video appeared first on Destructoid.

Candy dispenser confirmed

Nintendo have released a new video looking at a creative piece of software for their upcoming? Labo project. The "Toy-Con Garage" allows users to make various reactive devices by linking a selection of cause-and-effect options.

The software is based around the concept of input and output.?? Users can select various motions, such as button presses or specific stick movement, and then link those inputs to a variety of effects. So, for example, pushing the stick upwards wo?uld make the screen light up, or the face buttons could be mapped to play sound effects.

Through this simple, rudimentary method of button redefinition, children can put together simple projects using movement, light and?? sound, whilst learning about the cause-and-effect nature of programming "Input these in??structions to create this outcome", so to speak.

Examples given include redefining other? Labo kits, such as the fishing rod, to work with the?? remote control car, and even a fun little gizmo that dispenses candy when money is inserted.

When I was a wee nipper, we had these small science kits you could buy from Radio Shack where you would link various wires and resistors to m??ake lamps light up, or ?a alarm sound. The Toy-Con Garage reminds me of those, in principle. I think it's a pretty neat idea.

The first Nint?endo Labo kits launch April 27 on Switch.

The post Nintendo Labo’s Toy-Con Garage helps kids explore basic code creation appeared first on Destructoid.

Promoted Blog

_{[Gamemaniac3434 used his profession and passion in the field of microbiology to recreate our esteemed mascot in bacteria and then described the process of how it all went down. As someone who can't draw at all I appreciate these alternative forms of fanart, now if only I could rework HAARP to make Mr. Dtoid in the clouds. ~Anthony]}

As some of you may be awa??re, I am a student of the school of microbiology. Currently I’m attempting to get into gra?duate school, th?at I may rai?n down a plague of terror not seen since the black death for the glory of mankind. In my ruminations on such things, I sometimes look back on my days of college and think on the micr?obiology type things I did there. And that brings us to the topic of this particular blog - the creation of Mr. Destructoid in glorious bacterial splendor. I’ve been musing on discussing how I did this for a while and finally decided to do it, with potential for an additional something I'll bring up at the end of the blog.

As almost none of you may be aware, microbiologists have held a long fascination with the artistic mediums possible using bacteria and Petri dishes. Even Alexander Fleming, the man famously credited with finding and then putting into use penicillin, was known to use bacteria to paint with. Today there are competitions, galleries, and class sessions that utilize bacteria to create gorgeous works of art - and I was given an opportunity to try my hand at this activity during the later years of my college schooling. In my Microbial Gene?tics class, the Christmas season was upon us and it was time to be festive. To that end, we were?? to have a fun little activity, one that would teach us about genetics and allow us to indulge in our creativity.

The experiment would be a matter of transposon mutagenesis of a photosynthetic bacteria. To attempt to explain it as simply as I can, the gist was that we were going to take small “jumping genes” that leap from chromosome to chromosome like little parasites and use them on the photosynthetic bacteria. These transposons would hopefully be inclined to jump into the genetic areas that had to deal with the complex photosynthesis proces??s in this bacterium. Because there are multiple levels of coloration for these systems and their receptors, disabling one system would cause the bacteria to change its coloration from the normal purple it started off as. Bacteria able to survive mutagenesis-the number one result of mutation is death so there was a lot of casualties one presumes-would grow and could then we could go about collecting different colored colonies that had not only survived their transposon mutagenesis but changed their color. 

Once these colonies were picked, they were spread across the plate in what's commonly known as a “lawn” on a Petri plate, meaning that the plate was covered in a thick film of bacterial growth for us to use as paint. The bacteria were not fast-growing, and so it took a while for the lawns and subsequent painintings to grow into their final state. When the plates were rich with bacteria our “paint” ready to used on our ??“canvas” - fresh Petri plates ready for us to paint upon and let grow into whatever we could imagine. I stopped for a moment - I have some artistic leanings so the possibilities swirled around in my brain of what to do, till I settled on Mr. Dtoid. Serving as the icon of a site I had grown to love, I figured it’d be cool to do him up in a way I was relatively sure no one else would have ever done - and hopefully I could do a simple enough mock-up of him that would make painting him possib?le. And so using toothpicks I crafted him using a few different strains including an orange contaminant that had recently gotten into the lab.

Regrettably, there were a few issues. The first was that the green colony we had that I used had turned lighter orange in the process of growing so it wasn’t green after growth. The second issue was that regrettably the contaminant being used was a poor choice; colorful though it may have been it was also fast growing and overtook parts of the Mr. Dtoid avatar. Still, for a first?????????????????????????? go-round, I’m still proud and happy with it, and these issues can someday be corrected if I get the chance to once more paint with bacteria, celebrating a love of mine in the field of science and a site I still hold in quite high regard. And someday hopefully I can make something up to the higher levels you see in this field a la this. 

Thanks for reading, and I’d like to offer to you an invitation to share your own Mr. Dtoid in the comments below.  You a good drawing person? Why not submit a drawing of that robot we’ve come to know and love? Etch Mr. Dtoid into your flesh in tattoo form? Why not submit that and talk about why you did it, and how you went about getting it done? Have some spare clay/human flesh just lying around going to waste? Why not sculpt an effigy of the God King of Destructoid that all may know of his everlasting glory? The choice is really only limited to your imagination, and I’d love to see if some of the artists?? or various people from all walks of life Dtoid hosts would like to toss something into the mix. If there's enough of a response I’ll see about slapping together a follow-up blog, and if not, c’est la vie.

The post Making Mr. Dtoid: Beautiful in Bacteria appeared first on Destructoid.

Paradox Lost

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Cloverfield continuum, The Cloverfield Paradox happened. The third installment in the Cloverfield trilogy / continuum / universe offers nothing new and little that's exciting. It's not exactly a self-contained film, it's not really a monster film, and it's not truly a sci-fi film just because it happens in space. It just is. Cloverfield didn't deserve a sequel. 10 Cloverfield Lane was great, outside of the last 10 minutes that tried to tie it to the original. The Cloverfield Paradox needs an identity and a do-over. Do yourself a favor and scroll to another title in your mom's Netflix library?, then w??atch it instead. 

The Cloverfield Paradox
Director: Julius Onah
Rated: TV-MA
Release Date: February 4, 2018 (Netflix)

It’s 2028 and the world is in turmoil. Our energy crisis has come to a head and times are getting desperate. Humanity has only one hope, an orbiting space station testing a particle accelerator that’s going to deliver an endless supply of ‘free’ energy?? and save the world from descending into wars and chaos. Only, not so fast! Whil?e our crack team of multilingual scientists orbit the earth, playing foosball in their luxuriously space station and watching the old telly, some kook pitching his own book reveals that the science is untested, unproven witchery that could literally tear apart the fabric of space time and, you guessed it, release demons. That’s right, it’s chaos! Chaos to prevent chaos.

Thematically, chaos is a rather nice modifier, as it essentially applies to every aspect of the film. Chaotic writing. Chaotic editing. Chaotic storytelling archs. Etcetera. It’s just chaos. Somewhere along the way, someone obviously thought having science that couldn't be explained allows for the ultimate creative license to bend rules. This is literally what ha??ppens: we’re told, no one in this movie understands the science. You don’t understand the science. Ergo, we can film anything we want. Suddenly, people from other dimensions are trapped inside walls; guinea pig earth worms vanish, only to suddenly reappear inside a scientist, causing them to explode; and ??people uncontrollably phase right through solid metal.

Maybe this all makes sense within the confines of chaos science, but it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny when the pe?rson from another dimension suddenly has access to her own video voicemail on the space station from our dimension. And, no matter what is happening, a severed arm has no mind of its own, though it makes for a lovely gag moment. This compiling of ‘anything goes’ logic allows the filmmakers to employ the cheapest (not monetarily) effects to goad the audience's reactions this way and that. But to what purpose? Is it to scare us? Not really. Gross us out? Hard to say. The plot points and twists don’t add up to a genre that would dictate inciting those reactions. So what’s happening, really?

It’s impossible to say, other than that these seven seemingly highly accomplished and intelligent scientists go straight to shit t??he first moment something goes wrong. You might expect that tensions would rise after the situation progressed over time. You would be wrong. Humanity’s best trying to save humanity, or more of the same hackneyed stuff that epitomizes so much of what’s not really thought-tested writing.

If you’re wondering where the monster is, well, don’t worry, it’s there. Cut throughout this hodge podge of nonsense is one man on earth, a doctor. He just so happens to be the husband of one of our astronauts. He’s on earth, and as the particle accelerator has caused the problems in space, it has also apparently caused the problems on earth (though—this is not implicitly said—it could be that the monster’s appearance is an entirely coincidental and separate concurrent event). The events of Cloverfield ar??e hinted at here and there, with there apparently being more than one monster?? (again, unclear).

One by one, the astronauts are removed from the story until only two survive, manage?? to get the station to operate successfully, and reverse whatever it is they’ve done. They subsequently eject themselves from the space station to, in theory, return home triumphantly with the data needed to recreate their science and provide energy for all on earth, kumbaya, let’s break open ?the champagne.

But wait, there are still monsters. We’re reminded of this by one final reveal that shows the top third of the Cloverfield creature in all its glory, for a few moments. Did we need three films to provide the reveal promised in the first? Doubtful. One almost feels bad for the actors, as they may not have even known what they were getting into. During the casting for the original Cloverfield,?? the actors were given scripts to previous? J.J. Abrams projects, so as to continue secrecy. The acting is not at fault for shortcomings here.

As with other J.J. Abrams productions, i.e. Lost, there comes a point in time when you question whether or not you should just cut your losses. For me, with Lost, it was sometime not long after season two. This is your Lost season two moment: don’t keep watching—there’s no glorious revelation, just increasingly crazy happenings that never clarify anything. You’ve already seen the best there is to see (10 Cloverfield Lane), now move along.

The post Review: The Cloverfield Paradox appeared first on Destructoid.

Like the horns on a rainbow lizard

A couple years ago, a little board game called Evolution came out of Kicks??tarter and made a bit of a splash at the watering hole. Its representation of the adaptation of a species to its environment and to other nearby species was spot on. Some sessions were more interesting than others depending on the luck of the draw, but each one told its own distinct narrative.

Today, developer North Star Games has one of the biggest booths at PAX Unplugged. The whole thing is dedicated to Evolution, its two expansions Flight and Climate, its two-player offshoot The Beginning, and its upco?ming digital release on A??ndroid, iOS, and PC.

You could say that?? since the original board game release, North Star's business has really... evolved. (I'm sorry.)

The core gameplay remains the same. The group as a whole determines if there is f??east or famine at the body of?? water that acts as a meeting place for so many budding species. Players use cards to either add news species (allowing for more variety and cooperation), increase the population of existing species (letting that player collect more food), increase the body size of species (which affects predator/prey relationships), or add new traits to species, which confer special abilities and differentiate one animal from the next.

In place of the original version's simple cardboard rectangles, each species is represented by its footprint, with enough room to hold its three traits and all the other stats. This gives way to some clever animation to represent the various game events: when a creatur??e evolves into a carnivore its toes sprout sharp claws, or when one goes extinct it withers away until it's only bone, like a fossil waiting to be discovered and studied some day far in the future.

The animation seems like a minor thing, but ??it adds more oomph to all of the interactions. Where it was always satisfying to set up a cooperation chain to feed every animal in one go, watching the tokens cascade across the play area almost elicits the same feeling of setting up a long combo in a match-three puzzle game and seeing everything fall into place.

Of course, the board-to-video game conversion gains the usual benefit of speed. With no setup or takedow?n time (and no analysis paralysis from AI opponents), it's looking like it'll be possible to get more games in at a time.

Evolution (the video game) just finished a successful Kickstarter campaign last month, but it's clear the development is already pretty far along. One of the backer levels even taps into one of my favo??rite aspects of the board game: creating an animal with traits that seem bizarre together -- like Fat Tissue and? Climbing -- then imagining what that creature would look like. Backers who put in a premium could suggest a trio of traits and get some custom art of that animal in game as achievement art or otherwise.

All in all, Evolution is looking good. It's clearly far along?? in its development, and it's set to release in early 2018.

The post Evolution’s transition from cardboard to digital is looking sharp appeared first on Destructoid.

He watches it so you don't have to

Whenever you see a new actio??n movie coming out that defies the laws of physics or sense you are always told to "check your brain at the door." Now for most movies I can do this, I'll watch a giant green man who got his powers from exposure to radiation punch a Norse god in the face for two hours and happily chow down on the popcorn because hey whatever it's a comic book. But when it comes to something I've been educated and interested in for more than half my life, the door brain checking becomes a bit harder.

I was educated and currently work in the field of meteorology; it's been a lifelong passion of mine and a subject that I've always found fascinating. As Destructoid writer Mike Sounders likes to say I enjoy "sniffing clouds." So when movies dealing with weather come about I'm always going to look at it through a critical scientific lens as well as a more universal movie-going lens. Geostorm is a disaster no matter which le?ns you look at it through.

Natural disaster movies are always a hazard when you know how the things they are trying to portray work. Some are not so bad like Twister that uses a real-world experiment and glams it up a bit for Hollywood. The worst offender though is The Day After Tomorrow which not only spits in the face of science but tried to explain it. Geostorm mostly fails at its portrayal of phy?sical science, but it does manage to get a few things right, so let's look at what they mostly got wrong with a few nods of "almost had it"

Suffice to say, spoilers will follow from? this point. But don't worry, you'?ve already seen this movie a hundred times.

The movie starts off with a description of a world ravaged by natural disasters, our world. They don't try to skirt around the climate change issue and instead face it head-on. It is in 2019 when the bodies pile too high and action must be taken. There is a direct mention of two million people dying in one day because of a heat wave in Spain which is preposterous to me -- the highest number of heat wave deaths in recorded history only tops out around 70,000 and that is over the entire perio?d, not one day.

In order to control the weather that is quickly becoming more and more extreme, a network of satellites is put together to control as the movie puts it "the three basic properties of weather. Temperature, pressure, and wa??ter." Here is one area where they actually get things kinda right, but only to an extent. Hypothetically if (and that's a gigantic if) you could control those three things you might be able to control the weather, but the problem is that the atmosphere is a chaotic sphere of ever-changing layers. Every little bit interacts and is influenced by all surrounding parts of the atmosphere. It wants to be in equilibrium so when a small anomaly such as a pocket of high-pressure forms, you would get a mass of air rushing out of the center. These winds would potentially be more damaging than the initial storm and would beg the question which is worse, a rainstorm or a massive downburst?

This would happen because in atmospheric thermodynamics there are two basic motions, rising and falling. The general rule of thumb is that rising promotes precipitation and storm growth because as a parcel rises it cools and therefore the water vapor condenses, with sinking motion though it generally meaning conditions are improving. Yes, most downward motion is caused by precipitation but the precipitation aides in making the weather more stable. To artificially manufacture "nice weather" would either require a strong burst of downward motion (which would warm the surface significantly as it fell due to the adiabatic lapse rate which states that as air falls it warms) or the complete? evaporation of all water molecules in the air which would also require a massive amount of warming, which is one of the leading issues of global climate change, right?

_{(Image source: Glendale Community College)}

So out of the gate, we are already dealing with something that is completely farfetched and I should just stop, right? Nope. Let's look at some of the disasters that the movie puts for?th.

The first disaster that is presented is a highly localized ice storm in a remote Afghanistan village. The area is depicted as being flash frozen with the rest of the desert around it sweltering in 130 degree (freedom unit) heat. Nope. Even if you could cool an area through, as the movie puts it, "using sonic waves to slow movement, therefore, cooling the area" all that cool air would have to go somewhere. Remember the atmosphere wants to be in equilibrium and cold air is denser than warm air so a rush? of cold air would have shot out in all directions from the village causing cooling and a massive dust storm. Seems like their miss in the accurac?y department actually robbed them of a good action scene.

Next, there was a scene where the high heat caused a chain gas main explosion and widespread building collapse which is a bit more geology and civil engineering for m?y expertise but now it was all evident, things were headed towards a geostorm. A massive storm that would engulf the entire world and cause the doom of our kind.

Wait, what?

How can a storm be so massive that it covers the entire planet? Also, how can it j?ust form in a few hours? Hurricanes only get to be the size that they are because they spin and churn over the warm ocean for almost two weeks before slamming into land, but I'm supposed to believe a storm could envelop the entire world in a matter of hours? The concept of a geostorm is impossible even from a physical perspective. Eventually, storms just get too big to sustain themselves or they would begin to interfere with each other's growth and stability.

Take for example this year's Atlantic hurricane season. ??At one point Hurricane Irma was chugging along through the Antilles with Hurricane Jose following at a moderate distance behind. Once Irma made landfall and her movement west slowed down, it allowed Jose to close the distance between the two. As the winds of Irma lashed the eastern Gulf of Mexico region, those same winds began to eek into Jose's storm structure and eventually tore it apart because it created too much of an unfavorable wind to allow Jose to sustain. Jose weakened significantly until Irma was out of the way, but by then Jose was too far north to be in favorable waters and just petered out in the North Atlantic. You can see this interaction in the following video. Irma is the larger storm on the left and Jose is the smaller one on the right.

Other reasons why an all-encompassing superstorm would be impossible is bec?ause as mentioned earlier the two basic motions of the atmosphere come into play. A storm needs upward motion to both grow and sustain itself, and precipitation is a downward motion. So eventually the storm would start to rain itself out. You see this a lot in supercells that don't sustain growth properly and eventually begin to rain (remember, downward motion) into their updraft column (the part of a storm structure that allows grow?th) which quickly brings about the storm's death.

The movie then hit the brakes with the natural disasters until the final half hour where they just slap you across the face with every single one that you saw in the trailer. Seriously there ??were no surprises, you saw all of the disasters in the movie in the trailer. There's a case to be made that trailers give away too much of the movie they are promotin?g, but that's another article. So now let's rapid-fire through the disasters that popped up in the final third of the movie.

At one point there are hailstones the size of a bus falling. Nah. Hailstones form?? when frozen precipitation in the upper levels of the atmosphere fall enough in the atmosphere to be above freezing, they then partially melt, and are shot back up into the freezing levels thanks to upward motion. The liquid that formed refreezes but takes on more mass because as water freezes it expands. This cycle continues until the hailstone is too large for the updraft to keep up in the air and it falls to the earth as hail. In order to keep a hailstone the size of a bus up in the air long enough to form into that size would require an immense amount of wind, not to mention time which the movie did not allow.

_{I know it's hard for me to watch this too}

The next disaster shown was a cold front racing on shore in Brazil flash freezing the ocean and everyone in its path. Assuming this is being caused by the satellite rushing cold air down from an offshore point, the temperature change that would be required to flash freeze the oceans would be somewhere around -60 degrees Fahrenheit/-35 degrees Celsius. Not saying it would be physically impossible, just that it wouldn't happen naturally. The whole flash freezing people and an airplan??e, well, that's another story entirely.

Another part of the movie that is not physically impossible but exceedingly rare is the mul??tiple tornado cluster that approached a remote village near the end. Tornado research is still years away from being as advanced as other weather phenomena but there have been documented sightings of cluster tornadoes. There is also the belief that some larger tornadoes are just a cluster of mini tornadoes that have merged in one debris cloud but nothing concrete has ever been proven on this theory.

It should be noted though that even to this day the ability to predict where a tornado will form has only a short amount of lead time due to the fact that the actual precise conditions that go into a tornado's form??ation are still unknown. So the ability to create a tornado would requ??ire that knowledge, so good on this world for cracking that code.

The tidal wave that crashes into Dubai?, while a bit exaggerated, is possible if perfect conditions existed. Personally I don't know how a weather sat?ellite could produce a 100-foot tidal wave. The Persian Gulf does sit on a tectonic plate, but even with that added threat, a tidal wave that would reach as high as the one in the movie is highly improbable.

Finally we get to the climax, where a character literally tries to use the weather that he is controlling to kill off all that stand in his way for power. How does he want to do this? By blowing up a buil??ding with lightning.

_{Gerard Butler looks on as what little sense this movie had disappears}

Even in a hyper-unbelievable scenario like the one the movie presents, lightning would not be able to produce the Michael Bay-level explosion that I witnessed at the climax of the movie. The only way lightning would cause such a large explosion?? is if the entire building was lined with explosives and used a lightning rod as the detonator pin. Never mind the fact that even the most active storm can't shoot off lightning like it is the lighting coordinator for an EDM concert as the movie portrayed. Also, with how much lightning was going off, you would think you wouldn't be able to hear the dialogue due to the fact that it would just be a cacophonous roar of thunder.

But of course, the hero saves the day and all the storms immediately die out. In reality, this wouldn't happen as quickly as p??ortrayed in the movie, but because these anomaly storms' fuel was cut off, they would not be able to sustain and the storms would quickly bu??rn themselves out. Just not in the matter of seconds.

So yeah, the movie got nearly everything wrong but they did manage to get some things physically right, even if they exaggerated it to unbelievable levels. Don't get me wrong though, even if they got the science right Geostorm would have remained a boring, by-the-numbers disast?er movie that isn't worth your ti?me.

At least they didn't men?tion ??HAARP, though. Our secret control remains.

The post A meteorologist reviews Geostorm appeared first on Destructoid.

Adrenline fueled future

In recent years there has been an uptick in the number of games that wear their difficulty on their sleeves. Countless games on Steam right now talk about how hardcore they are and how they will beat you down to the p??oint of quitting and crying. Most of these games do i?t by stacking the deck against you or not really giving you the tools to properly defeat your foes. It's the good ones that give you the tools to win, but also give those same tools to the AI as well as the skills to use them well.

RUINER, I'm happy to say, is one of those good difficult games. But hard gameplay alone does not a great game make, there needs to be more to round out the difficultly and keep you coming back for more. You need a world, a story, a character, or something that gets its hooks into you and makes you pick the controller up off of the ground that you just threw it onto. RUINER will have that masochistic pull for som????e but for others, I wonder if they will not be as easily hooked.

RUINER (PC [Reviewed], PS4, Xbox One)
Developer: Reikon Games
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Released: September 26, 2017
MSRP: $19.99

RUINER at its core is a cross? between a twin-stick shooter and a bullet hell that is slathered to the hilt with futuristic science-fiction overtones. The combat is kinetic, varied, and most of all fast. You always need to be moving or else you will face a quick death.

To stave off your own death while bringing it down upon your enemies, you will have at all times a pipe and an upgradable machine gun with unlimited ammo. Better and more varied weapons can be procured in each level but everything outside of your base equipment has limited uses. This can get a little annoying when you finally find a gun you like, but it never really feels unfair as the base weapons are formidable and at ?times I found the base gun more useful against certain enemies.

Along with weapons you also have abilities that really give you the upper hand against your e??nemies, until they can start using the same ones. The abilities are about what you'd expect for a twin-stick or bullet hell: you've got a dash, various shields, stun grenades, berserker mode. Nothing really out of the ordinary, but you can tell the combat is designed around you mastering the abilities given to you.

Abilities are unlocked and upgraded using skill points that you gain from leveling up as well as doing side quests in the hub world. One of the things I really love about the game is the fact that you can change your abilities and skill points assigned to them at any time. It both feels very appropriate for a world filled w??ith transhumanism and is also integral to your success against ever-changing enemies. The game never really lets you stay with one ability set and instead forces you to adapt to different situations by throwing enemies at you that have different strengths and weaknesses that can be exploited with your available abilities.

There are a few abilities that I found kinda useless such as one that increases your power as your combo level grew, which would be good if RUINER threw enemies at you at a quick enough pace to string combos. On the flip side, a few became a bit overpowered as I neared the end thanks to the ability for me t?o lock up enemies and breeze through the final few levels and bosses.

That's not to say that the game isn't difficult; when played at the developer-suggested level it is. There are two levels below that though if you don't feel like wanting to scream at the top of your lungs from your 50th straight death. I chose to go with the suggested level and I can say while it is difficult, the curve is gradual and leads you into increasingly difficult enemies at a comfortable pace. There were a few bumps in the road but ultimately I got through them all and found that I fared much better after I took into account that I was not invulnerable. After that, I started treating RUINER more like a bullet hell while still finding ways to attack and the combat just clicked in my brain. I also found the game ??more enjoyable on a controller but the option to play on a keyboard is a bonus for those of you who prefer it.

Throughout the game there are three differing types of encounters you will face. Your usual horde encounter, mini-bosses, and as to be expected, boss battles. The horde encounters are nothing really special wh?ere you face down a bunch of basic enemies thrown at you incrementally. The mini-bosses are the ones that I found to be both the most difficult and therefore satisfying to conquer. These encounters were usually a single souped-up enemy that had powerful guns and abilities that rivaled your own as well as much more health than your usual enemies. The bosses were interesting at first but as the game wore on they reused mechanics from earlier fights and?? I don't know if it was done out of bad game design or to fit the narrative of an overarching enemy.

A??s far as story, it starts you off with a character called Your Master giving you one single objective: KILL BOSS. After you kill Boss, the story devolves into your usual cyberpunk tropes. Double crosses, corporations as powerful as nations, missing siblings that weren't mentioned prior to you being betrayed. Overall the story was kinda weak which I wouldn't mind if the game didn't try to market itself as story driven. There were some enjoyable and funny moments but they mostly came from the supporting cast of characters instead of the main story.

It really disappoints me that the story is so bland too because the world that RUINER takes place in feels so vibrant and well fleshed out. While walking around the hub city of Rengkok you can meet all the usual characters you'd expect to see in a cyberpunk world. Anarcho-hackers who wanna burn the world down, sadists who admire how much pain you put yourself through, state surveillance robotic cats, it's all here. All of these characters and the rest of the world are fleshed out through an in-game database that rivals the one included with Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. I took upon these entries with great voracity and upon reading through all of them it just feels like they left so much on the table with regards to using that world well. I suspect some people will get more mileage out of the sto??ry than I but this is clearly a subjective issue.

Aesthetically the game looks and feels amazing. The use of red as a prevailing color really aids in creating an atmosphere of paranoia and dan?ger. At times the levels get a little dark but thankfully all enemies are outlined in red so you can see them even in the dark. The soundtrack is just wh??ere it needs to be for every part. In the hub world, a song of almost sad longing plays that you could swear was being sung by someone on a nearby roof. In combat though, the music is filled with just the kind of adrenaline electro music you'd like to hear as you drive a pipe into someone's head.

The only technical issue I have is at the time of writing this review you could only have one save slot. I don't know why this is a problem in games all of a sudden but I lost all of my progress trying to recreate a patched out glitch that I had found in an earlier build and it's a little more than annoying. As far as endgame cont?ent, the lack of a leaderboard or arcade mode feels like a missed opportunity but it's nothing major and doesn't detract from the base game in any way.

When all is said and done, you ultimately have a solid cyberpunk action game that has exceptional gun and melee based combat taking place in a beautifully fleshed out world that it, unfortunately, doesn't utilize to its full potential. It may not be perfect but I can wholeheartedly recommend RUINER if you are looking for?? a good challenge or a game that would fit p??erfectly in a dark room with your headphones cranked to maximum.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: RUINER appeared first on Destructoid.

Battle.net to become Skynet within a few years

Blizzard, in association with research company DeepMind, have developed software based on the real-time strategy game StarCraft II that teaches computers how to think for themsel??ves.

Judgement Day is upon us... Maybe.

The two companies have co-developed a software package, known as SC2LE, to advance the computer's ?ability to read a situation and then develop a strategy based on the given information. Blizzard has also given the software over 60,000 game replays (with plans to expand it to 500,000) to peruse for reference and experience.

The hope is that through the study of actions and counter-actions within the millions of moment-to-moment encounters in these replays, the computer will learn, through imitation, how to best react to any given setup or problem posed by its StarCraft opposition. Though ?I'd like to?? see it handle a full-on Zerg rush. Sorry "Johnny 5", that's not happening.

StarCraft II was specifically chosen because of its multi-layered task management, requiring the player to build and maintain an efficient base, whilst also managing resources, building defences and mounting an army for its own series of attacks. DeepMind's A.I "agents" were able to perform these functions on a small scale, but struggled when presented with a full game scenari?o, which requires endless adaptation and multitasking.

Researchers are working to develop their agent's ability to put all the pieces together, ultimately being able to react to any given situation in a full-game environment and therefore being able to beat every single StarCraft player on the globe. Yes, I'm including Korea.

Whilst it seems odd to spend so much money, time and effort to teach a computer to play a perfect game of StarCraft II, it's obvious that, on a larger scale, the idea of computer A.I having a self-taught understanding of predictability, adaptation, counter-intelligence and decision-making is absolutely fascinatin??g. Fascinating and terrifying.

Still, I for one welcome ?Sarah Kerrigan as our new overlord.

SC2LE A.I. research [DeepMind Blog]

The post StarCraft II being used ?to train artificial intellig?ence appeared first on Destructoid.

Pat yourself on the back, capsuleer

Earlier this year, CCP Games, Massively Multiplayer Online Science, and Reykjavik University jointly announced Project Discovery. The program is ostensibly an EVE Online mini-game that presents players with images of protein patterns within cells. The goal is to correctly identify the patterns when compared to thousands of other players. Doing so is rewarded with in-game Sisters of EVE equipment.

This afternoon at Fanfest, it was revealed exactly how well Project Discovery is doing. In the six weeks since its widespread implementation, players have contributed a combined 7,894,528 image classifications. It's enough for speaker?? Attila Szantner to call it "one of the biggest citizen science efforts today."

Citizen science is a crowd-sourced form of science where non-scientists perform the vast majority of the experimentation. Accordin?g to Emma Lundberg of The Human Protein Atlas and one of the leads on Project Discovery, players have contributed 18.2 million minutes' worth of work. That stretches out to 163 working years. With inflated numbers like that, it's easy to see the importance of scale for an endeavor like this.

Bolstering that impressive statistic is the fact that Project Discovery has seen those classifications come from a wide number of players. Szantner mentioned that most citizen science projects boil down to something more akin to "cluster science" -- the idea that the bulk of the results come from a small and dedicated group of people. EVE Online players are staying committed to the cause.

Interestingly, Project Discovery already had to ??be reworked because a good number of people treated it too much like a game. Lundberg showed a slide that indicated that half of the classifications were of cytoplasms. That's because it's the simplest to identify, so players were actively seeking those out to get rewards as quickly and as easily as possible. Changes were then made to the system that brought the cytoplasm outlier back closer to the mean.

Even though everyone involved seems absolutely giddy by Project Discovery to this point, there's still a lot of work to do. Soon, another 5,000 images will be introduced for mass classification. In December? of this year, Lundberg says that a map of the subcellular protein atlas will be published. Project Discovery has already produced very real results for the scientific community, and that'll likely eventually turn into results for the medical community. That's a fantastic contribution from a bunch of people who are playing a sci-fi space game.

The post EVE Online’s real-world science project is going unprecedentedly well appeared first on Destructoid.

Project Discovery

CCP is giving EVE Online players a chance to take off their space pilot hats and put on their space scientist hats. The Iceland-based developer has introduced a new mini-game to EVE Online that both rewards players and takes a crack at? ma??king the world a better place.

Announced last year but just launched today, Project Discovery is now a part of the EVE universe. CCP tea?med up with Massively Multiplayer Onl??ine Science and Reykjavik University to form a vast collection of cell images that need categorization. The idea is to crowdsource protein patterns in cells so that scientists can better understand protein functions.

The way it works is that players are given a high-resolution picture of a human cell along with a smatter?ing of samples at the nucleus, cytoplasm, and periphery levels. It's up to them to choose which layer and look their image most resembles. (The pictures at the bottom of the post offer a good example as to how the process works.) Since that's an imperfect technique, the scientists will compare answers against other players to ensure they're getting the most accurate results. 

The players also get some in-game rewards for taking time out of their space lives to do some pattern recognition. Completing the Project Discovery images nets them XP, ISK, and "Analysis Kredi??ts." They also get the warm fuzzies of helping out the scientific and medical communities -- a feeling you can't buy with all the PLEX in the world.

Project Discovery [EVE Online]

The post EVE Online has its players doing so?me real science for the?? good of the world appeared first on Destructoid.

Not even once

Most gamers scoff at the suggestion that video games can influence real life behavior. "I've been playin?g violent video games my whole life and I turned out all right!" we say, citing anecdotal evidence as fact. Well, sorry to say, a new study has come out linking video games with engaging in risky behavior.

As stated in an art??icle ??in the Journal of of Youth and Adolescence, Brock University psychologists Paul J. C. Adachi and Teena Willoughby followed a group of adolescents for three years, surve??ying their gaming habits, self esteem, and participation in youth sports. The study found a long term predictive effect correlating sports video game play in youths to real life sports engagement as older adolescents.

Parents should always be aware of what kind of media their children are consuming. The ESRB system is in place for that. Even if a child argues for Madden or FIFA by saying "it's just a video game; I would never do this in real life," know that the games can ??have lasting effects, acting as a gateway to undesirable behavio??r.

[via Inverse]

The post P??laying sports video games increases? the risk of playing real sports appeared first on Destructoid.

It's science

It has been known for 20 years now: Charmander is the right choice.? For one, its tail is on fire. For two, it's a lizard, which is better than a turtle or a whatever Bulbasaur is supposed to be (some sort of gremlin, probably). For three, it evolves into a dragon. You can't beat that. But those are all very feely reasons to pick Charmander during the first visit to Professor Oak. Now we have some cold hard facts to back it up. I'm talking straight science.

Thomas Codd, a natural sciences student at the University of Leicester, wanted to know which of the three starter Pokémon is the most offensively powerful, so he crunched the numbers. Specifically, he looked at the energetic output of each Pokémon's signature move in its fully evolved form. He compared Charizard's Flamethrower, Blastoise's Hydro Cannon, and Venusaur'?s Solar Beam, and it was a blowout.

By measuring the size of Venusaur's petals, Codd determined the amount of solar energy converted to the?? beam to be about 194 kilojoules. The volume and velocity of water from Blastoise's cannons nearly double that at 386 kilojoules. Charizard puts both to shame with the heat from its flames producing about 7 billion kilojoules of energy. That's about 18 mil?lion times as much as Hydro Cannon.

To put it into perspective, the energy produced by Hydro Cannon could power a 60 watt light bulb for about 107 minutes. Meanwhile, the energy produced by Flamethrower could power that same light bulb for almost 3700 years.

Good g??ame, Blastoise, but you need to realize when y??ou've been bested. I don't care if you're Super Effective against Charizard; it still has you beat by several orders of magnitude.

The post Cha??rmander is obje??ctively the most powerful generation one starter Pokemon appeared first on Destructoid.

41% say some games portray women poorly

A new? study by Pew Research Center presents data on American adults' v??iews of video games, their impact, and the term gamer.

The study found that wh??????????????????????????ile 49 percent of all American adults play video games, only 10 percent o??f those identify themselves as gamers. 60 percent of participants believe video games are mostly played by men, while a nearly identical share of men and women report playing games (48 percent of women; 50 percent of men). Men are twice as likely as women to call themselves gamers.

Apparently there are still a lot of people who think violence in video games is related directly to? violent behavior in real life, as four in ten adults said they believe that. While that isn't the majority, it is still a surprising number.

When asked if video games portray women poorly, 41 percent of adults answered that was true for some games, while 14 percent sai?d it was true for most games. When asked about the poor portrayal of minorities in games, the numbers are a lot lower with 9 percent saying most games do a poor job, and 20 percent saying only some games have issues with the proper portrayal of minorities.

Unsurprisingly, the study found?? that people who play games think more positively of them and are likely to disagree with negative portrayals of video games and gamers.

As with any of these studies, nothing is written in ?stone or proof of anything other than statistics of what a small selection of people answered in a survey. This particular study had a sample of 2,001 adults 18 years or older and was conducted via telephone; 1,300 on cellphones and 701 on landlines. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who was at home. Interviews in the cell phone sample were conducted with the person who answered t?he phone if that person was 18 or older.

My take? Not that surprising, video games have become just another form of media a majority of us take in that we don't feel the need to label ourselves after. I don't know too many people who call themselves readers or movie watchers, though occasionally I'll hear people call themselves movie buffs. I feel like that is the kind of person who would self-identify as a gamer -- s??omeone who plays a lot of games often to the point that it is a major part of their life.

Gaming and Gamers [Pew Research Center]

The post Study: Half of American adult?s pla?y video games, 10% call themselves gamers appeared first on Destructoid.

Women vs. Men in Video Game Consoles

Would you believe me if I told you that more women own a home video game console in the United States than men? According to Pew Research Center's study of 1,907 adults ages 18 and older, that is indeed the case.

As you can see from the results, women own consoles at a rate of five percent more than men. Also, people that have some college experience but never completed it make up the majority of console owners, which makes you wonder if people dropped out to become a Guitar Hero.

Personally, I'd take these results with a grain?? of salt, as there are many factors to consider such as the sample size, if the consoles were bought for their kids, and th?e fact that Pew doesn't specify if they asked about every console or just Xbox and PlayStation.

On top of that, for portable gaming devices, Pew lists the long-defunct PSP and the Sega Genesis, which as you know isn't even a portable console. Even if Pew had listed Sega's actual portable console, the Game Gear, it still would have been an odd listing for a survey in 2015. Now the Sega Nomad, ?that is where it was at! Plugging in another controller to play with a friend was the bomb, eve?n if the battery life on the thing was garbage.

The Demographics of Device Ownership [Pew Research Center]

The post Survey: More women own a video game consol?e in the US than men appeared first on Destructoid.